Miracle Issue 6
Woodcock -Bethany W Pope The first I'd ever seen, and alien to my conception of the citified world. I saw it sprawled in the sidewalk beside the Jury Inn, Swindon's bleak ornament. Its blunt wings were closed, framing the body in the shape of a heart. The dark breast torn from bones that were tooth-scraped and splintered, the vitals plucked from their stems and guy wires by a muzzle red-painted with blood. The fox did not kill it, it died by the road. The meat which remained looked nothing like even the dark meat of chicken. There was a stringy vitality there that brought to my mind a cow’s skinned haunches. Rapid twitch muscles our Sunday dinners could never equal- even if they had not spent their brief lives hormone pumped, locked in high cages. Beside these tatters the fox left, even a duck’s breast looks insubstantial as water. We humans forget the high cost of flight. The strenuous, ungraceful glory of beating down air.
I picked the body up, one-handed, surprised by the weight it had after a third was subtracted by the teeth of a fox and its back skinned bald by car grill. Its small head lolled loose on its short thick neck, the long flesh-toned beak pressed against my arm, a sword that would not fall. I ran my finger over the blood-groove, tracing the length of spear-bone to the delicate, down-soft hollow of the throat, the armored nest of all lost songs and thought, 'I cannot leave you naked by the side of the road.' Books in one hand, I held the corpse in my other, making the trek up the hill that leads to the library, looking for a place green enough to take my burden. I am used to seeming mad in this place where gentleness is madness and nature is something to be mown down by cars. I set it beside the roan tree which roots beside the theater and has not been knocked down yet. I left it there, wingspread, the empty pocket which held a heart once open to the morning air, ready for night to come on soft feet and cover the sight of the fox resuming its meal.
Bethany W Pope received her PhD from Aberystwyth University’s Creative Writing program. Her first poetry collection, A Radiance was published by Cultured Llama Press. Her work has appeared in: Anon, Art Times, Ampersand, Blue Tattoo, The Delinquent, De/Tached (an anthology released by Parthian), The Writer’s Hub, New Welsh Review, Every Day Poems, And Other Poems, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Magma, Words & Music, The Quarterly Conversation, Tears in the Fence, Ink, Sweat and Tears and Planet. Her work will appear in the next issues of Poetry Review Salzburg, Acumen, Pacific Poetry , Music& Literature, Anon, and The Screech Owl.
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