Like Paper
By Callie Plaxco
Someone I can’t remember who told me how to fold into a bird. It made no sense at the time but now that I am sitting in this sunlight I begin to understand the way an arm might one day flatten to a wing if beat down hard enough, creased and pierced and strung with beads pretend they’re feathers. Yes, I can imagine taking flight right through that window. Probably at first the jagged edges of glass would hurt as they slice through skin but the blood will drip away as my pretend wingspan flumes higher towards these tallest trees, the ones hovering above the roofline. Listen, I say, I’ve been having bird dreams my entire life. In fact, I think I’ve written this precise poem on a shitty desktop with a mouse and a hum and a floppy disk while sitting in a portable classroom. I was in high school, remember, I was so entirely broken. Really, I was incredibly sad. I’d sit in the sun wishing I was someone else. Had you told me then how to bend every piece of myself into something other, I would have snapped each bone in my body to reconfigure. And then I would have kept folding. Where’d she go, you’d wonder at the osseous pearl perched in the doorway. I wouldn’t answer, of course, my voice now furled and forgotten. Thank God I didn’t know you then, whoever you are, folder of things that shouldn’t be folded.
As her grandmother once said, Callie Plaxco flew the coop when she left South Carolina to journey west to the University of Wyoming for her MFA. Still in Wyoming, Callie lives with her husband, two small boys, and two big dogs. Her chapbook, Dear Person, is available at Dancing Girl Press and individual poems are published by in Carve Magazine, Tinderbox, Gingerbread House, and Sugar House Review.
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Brilliant poem.
Love it. Resonates with me.