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.

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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.