by Samuel Burt
Wrapped in six layers of plastic, and a hometown
sweatshirt for good measure, the cardinal
took the train from Ankeny to my office window,
with ‘92 scrawled under its driftwood stand
in my dad’s precise yet jagged hand.
And not his only carved gift; after decades
of Mother’s Days, his mother’s shelves
grew too full to treasure. Dad, the hunter,
brought home more painted wood than fowl—
pintails, loons, that one-off pelican.
I heard the cardinal was grandma’s favorite bird
above the rustle of her home’s dismantling,
the living room sanded down, sanitized for staging,
as cousins and grandkids bagged up their memories,
scrubbing white walls of their shadows.
So I took the cardinal. The dawn-shriek,
burn-through-snow cardinal. The front-yard-nest,
egg-on-the-ground cardinal. When I was eight,
with child’s hands, I knew where eggs belonged.
But for the nest whose freckled pearls I borrowed,
tested against my thumbnail, and returned,
condemned by human touch, human hands
tugged me from the lawn, my wrist fast in the grip
of grandmotherly fury. And I cried. Because
what else can you do when you learn
your hands move more cruelly than your mind?
That you’re tied to gifts of unmaking,
and that the same hands to trace a Dremel softly
down a wooden shoulder could tear mine from its socket
the next time I talk back, or ditch me back there,
in Ankeny, for another weekend, where I knew
I’d woven distrust’s dry and empty nest
around the heartwood of a grandmother’s love.
But hers was a love as kind and forgetful as death,
leaving grudges only in the shade of keepsakes.
Here on the sill, proud against a fading sun,
sits all I kept from that place. I never saw her die,
nor her dying. Just her jaundiced turn of cheek
as she stared out the window of my last visit:
at the feeder hanging from its hook, clear as an IV bag;
at the faithless birds who may have come that day,
but never after.
Samuel Burt is a poet and artist from Grinnell, Iowa. A 2022 winner of the AWP’s Intro Journals Project, Samuel’s work has been featured in Beaver Magazine, Salt Hill, Colorado Review, Ghost City Review, and Arc Poetry Magazine. He holds a poetry MFA from Bowling Green State University, reads for Fahmidan Journal, and works at a college library in Iowa.
Emerge Literary Journal 