PS_Winter_2015_PS Summer 12/2/14 9:33 PM Page 10
a l y s s a
s h a r r o c k
Nests By Christine Salvatore I. Because we are always in need of distraction, this year it is the birds we want to know all about. Call each thing by its right name. American Gold Finch. House Sparrow. Carolina Wren. We get closest to the wren as she builds her bowl-like nest next to our front door, lays five eggs, startles each time we come and go. Four weeks pass by. The wren abandons her unhatched eggs. We forget about birds for awhile but don't dispose of the nest because it's trying to tell us something, I think, about our divided home. Call each thing by its right name. Married, separated, divorced. Unlike the wren we cannot move on. II. I am trying to write about a bird. A bird and a nest. I am trying to write about the nest. The bird could be the me that I want to be, who understands a futile endeavor, who abandons the nest, who knows when
The yelling picks up once again, the police are deciding who should shoot Ayed. She must be shot; she is a rogue elephant who just killed a man. The trainer and his son sit on the guardrail; the father covers his son’s eyes. No man wants to shoot an elephant; no man wants to shoot a mother. She is a mother who just watched a man kill her daughter. I think of my mother’s wrinkles that only came after I moved into the city. In the confusion, Ayed’s ears go limp. Her breathing slows to a groan. She is wailing crying. Her trainer tries to reason with the police, every machine gun pointed in the same place. Ayed looks into the windows of the bus. I imagine she sees the tourists’ faces, horrified and crying. She walks past the bus slowly. Sorrow is also a universal language. Finally I hear the police officers decide. The Chief will shoot the elephant. They follow the groaning sobbing mother as she marches off the Sarighat Bridge. I hear no shots but I see Ayed in the distance fall on the bank of the Brahmaputra River. No shots were fired but her body goes limp in the dust. The mother makes one more exhale into welcomed death. It is bad luck to start the New Year without family. All of the drivers exhale with her and begin to cry. Today the trash in the Brahmaputra River floats by like an elegy of alligators and minor notes. I think I will fly a kite with my mother tonight.
it's time to take flight. If there was any grieving in her empty bones, she took it elsewhere in the end, away from the home she made, away from the failure that found her. 10
Will a distant bough, even broken, still support her song? Christine E. Salvatore received her MFA from The University of New Orleans. She currently teaches literature and creative writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Egg Harbor Township High School, and in the MFA Program at Rosemont College. She is a Gerealdine R. Dodge Poet and her poetry has recently appeared or will appear in The Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Mead Journal,Prime Number Magazine and in The Edison Literary Review. Her poem, Betrayal, was a finalist in the Southeast Review's 2014 Gearhart Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2005 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council of the Arts.
Alyssa is a newly-certified adult, living and working in Philadelphia, PA. She graduated from the University of Delaware in May of 2014 with degrees in Women and Gender Studies and English Writing. The day after graduation she began working with Gearing Up, a fantastic nonprofit aimed at empowering women in recovery from abuse, addiction, and incarceration to ride a bicycle. When she’s not working or writing, Alyssa is watching Netflix with her girlfriend, playing with her cat, or riding her bicycle.
