From her perch on the docent’s gloved wrist, she
watches us with the eyes of any creature handled too
much: featherless head a closed door, body a mask of
silence. In the steep twilight descending like the
backwards count of a nurse’s voice leading a patient
into unconsciousness, the handler explains to our
circle the generalities of the species—the turkey
vulture’s primary form of self-defense is the
regurgitation of semi-digested meat that is then
vomited onto a predator’s face—and the
particularities of this one, who had come to them with
a broken wing. I, too, have places on my body knitted
back together by unseen hands, scars laid while I slept
the sleep of the unknowing: one above the belly
button, and another below where two fingers must
have parted the dark hair before shaving a path. Does
she remember the first faces to peer toward her as she
surfaced? Every time I try to write what those hands
did, I end up plunging my own fingers deep inside
until I pull up the voice of the surgeon in post-op: I
usually have to pay women to take their clothes off for
me. Oh, the shudder of her black-feathered shoulders.
Oh, the bile rising in her throat
Emesis
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