A Word for Living Creatures

She opens the cage.
The birds leave.
She replaces their forms
with stones, closes
the cage, 
locks the door,
swallows the key.
She feels it settle
against a rib.

Its weight
turns her mute -

He comes home.
She opens the door
for him, says nothing,
stands in the entryway,
hands fluttering.
He pushes past her, 
looks at the cage 
and still lives,
leaves again.

The key stirs
in its sleep -

She returns to the cage,
whispers to the lock.
The door opens,
the stones awaken,
and the birds - 
the birds return
to earth, to her,
to ground and stone.

Her shoulder blades turn into wings. She feels them fold out of the bone, feels them the way she feels paper, feels and folds, folds wings. Paper wings. Papyrus. Parchment. Wings. Feathers. Paper birds. So light, they take flight at her breath. Take to flight like her wings, like her back covered in sheets of paper, her hands coated in white paper - snow? - no, no, white confetti. A party. A party of white feathers. White tinged with gray, blush-pink, the same shade once found upon her cheek when she saw - never mind what she saw. She saw - this story is not going the way she planned. It isn’t going at all. It’s going nowhere. No, it’s going somewhere fast. White feathers. White wings. She stalls. She stands at a window, watching the sun start to rise - winter-leaf brown, blush-pink, then - tangerine. Streaks of it. Streaks of it everywhere. Tangerine spilling across the sky, spilling through the window, spilling into her arms, across them, filling them, across her shoulder - no, her wings - asking her to stop stalling, to stop standing, to accept these new feathers, these new paper wings, to begin to fly.