Bird Note Poem Winter Roadside

Audio notes, car: I hope that when I come back from being dead that I have written enough poems about birds that I can come back as a murmuration.

//POEM//                                                                      //NOTES//
By the time winter has arrived I believe myself am
so shattered I cannot come back to life                -this could be the end of the poem
 
Sweet cowbird of death brings me egg
I gag on the fetal yellow thread of rebirth            -parasitic, punitive, reject mercy trick
 
Walk to the river and the parasites sing 
me my reflection. Face and body gone                 -omit sky/omit joy of breasts removed 
 
I have returned as many things flying 
as one, swooping to the lowest point                    -insert mercy/enjambment         
 
in the sky, rising again,                                                     
my starling heart a murmur.                                   -invasive, common, can't be killed back
 
 
Notes to self: insert daughter calling from the car "come back, come back," the urge to 
write about love—for her, the cold bright day you look at the ditch and they come back, 
hundreds thousands of them, she won't get out of the car, she can't hear the wings and 
you want to cry, she never looks when you point and yell "beauty, beauty" at the sky.