i never Wanted to be a bird

i never Wanted to be a bird Brooke Stanish

Inever wanted to be a bird until I saw you gaze at one suspended from behind your worn binoculars. I never wanted to be a bird until you brought me to your apartment that one day, ornithology textbooks strewn across coffee tables and the small square of the kitchen counter. The darkness of this small space was lit by the nearly technicolor images of birds freckling the top of your Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Eastern North America.

I’d like to think I’ve been the only one to watch the way your stacks of textbooks curved around the few family photos you own, but that isn’t true. When your books spill open, the birds see you too, and they might know you better than I ever could.

We cradled bird-spotted mugs of black coffee one night; you didn’t own any cream or sugar, or any form of food that couldn’t be bought in a can. We freed the cracked leather couch from its blanket of bird books. I flung some as you placed the others down as mothers do with already sleeping children. You were afraid the birds would wake up, I suppose, and maybe you were afraid they’d find me with you.

I never wanted to be a bird until that night when I listened to your serious voice recite that poem by Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” My hand lay like an outstretched wing, but you didn’t see it until the last line from which you blinked up as if you were looking through binoculars.

You drew back from the haze that held your eyes to the single window in your apartment, completely bare, no curtains, no blinds. Binocular eyes grasped down toward my hand, and you took it, as quietly as you moved your books.

I tried not to notice you glance toward one of them, draining your gravelly coffee and placing it down onto a coaster, covering the eyes of a woodpecker staring out. You knew I loved poetry, so you read to me. I was the poet, and you were the ornithologist.

A poem has never seized my throat the way it has yours, though. I was the poet, but I never spoke a blackbird into flight amidst a dim, crumbling little one-room apartment covered in ring-stained coffee cups and leaves you picked up because you thought they were beautiful. Your entire life seemed to me a poem picked up off the ground, dusted off, and placed on a coffee table, like a thimble or a stone.

Without leaving your hand, I twisted to look at your face. “What’s the real name for a cardinal—the scientific one, I mean?”

You raised your eyes and smirked, “Cardinalis cardinalis.”

“Oh, that’s it?” I accidentally stole my hand from yours. You looked down, eyes widened. I laughed, slipping my lead-stained fingers back around your coarse ones. “Also, can I ask you something?”

You swung yourself closer to face me, “Go ahead.”

“Do you have any idea what that poem you read means?”

Out from beneath your lifting lips, flew your answer, “Not a clue.”

A pair of your faded binoculars fell from where they laid on the back of the couch above us, they wedged themselves between us. You placed them on the table, and then you looked at me through eyes like birds and poetry. You looked at me, but not like one of your birds. I never really cared to be a bird. Flash Fiction

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