Heirloom

How objects contain more than what they seem: a Barlow knife. Blade jacked into handle. A mystery of you fingered in my pocket.

For years I pounded incessantly at the fissure between us. Last night I opened the garage to a fluttering. A mockingbird beating at window glass it could not see.

A neighbor once tied a silver shard in a shrub, showed me how mockingbirds hammer their reflections. Until they die or the mirror cracks.

I still bang away at space and wonder who might answer. Wonder how we might be the same. Contained or concealed. That bird, lost in the dark cathedral

of wrong place, bashing itself in hope enough pain ruptures the world to an open window again. How stunned I feel turning this knife over in my hands. Remember

how you beat me? How I burned my wrists with cigarettes? That hurt too shallow for my sister-- she began to cut. Blood a better beacon. Scars still gleam on the body she wanted

to fly from. Too much flesh to cup in my hands, too much bone to save. Unlike last night’s bird whose terror I scooped and enjoyed. A small heart beat the sudden

cadence of wings, as though I had fathered this creature by rubbing my palms. As a child, locked in a different garage, I panicked. Smashed a pane with bare fist. Bled for rescue.

From my hands, yesterday’s mockingbird flew outside, solid one moment, next a flight of ghost dissipated into night. So you left this knife, whose importance I cannot grasp,

no matter how tight my hold, as a bird never fathoms its own reflection. I know the blade whittled, your grip warmed its handle. Mockingbirds flit the yard but I cannot recognize mine.

Michael Milligan

Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer, and graphic arts production manager. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College, co-founded Poetry Oasis Worcester and was privileged to be an editor with Diner. His reviews, fiction, and poems have appeared in Agni, Diner, The New Orleans Review, and others.