Jessica Cuello
The Bird Girl
When a world was in me
I wept for the milk
burning my breast red
red as the wagon in the yard
and plastic things are ugly
when they’re old
I took a pill for that
for my child’s mouth
smaller than mine
There were seeds knotted
there were walls of me that slid
away, there was the red sea
Before I knit you in the womb
I knew you
and after I was never known
and when the world left me
I wept like Joseph,
father of no baby,
whose wife chose God,
God the adulterer
God loved only Her
Her bird gasp and bird gallows
Tiny annunciation
Nest of the dead
Jessica Cuello is the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016) and Hunt, a response to the absent feminine in Moby Dick and winner of the 2016 Washington Prize from The Word Works. She is also the author of the chapbooks Curie, By Fire, and My Father's Bargain, and she has been a recipient of the New Letters Poetry Prize and a Saltonstall Fellowship.
More from Vol. 34, Issue 3
To Sing, In Dixie // The Extinct Fresh Water Mussels of the Detroit River // The Ivory Gull Under the Bridge Over the Flint River // Noon in a Corner Café: The Sign
Terry Blackhawk
Saints, Tonguing
Mitchell Glazier
Sonnet II
Louise Labé, trans. Leah Souffrant
Damned // The Last Word
Tim McCoy
Poem for the Unborn // Classical Mechanics // Indigenous Plants // Thirteenth Wedding Anniversary
Nicole Walker
Summons in the Form of an Invasion // 37 Panoramic Views of Edo
Steve Barbaro
The Bird Girl
Jessica Cuello
“The ply of spirits on bodies": Diaspora and Metamorphosis in Donald Revell's “Short Fantasia"
Mark Irwin
Morning Quake // Friday's Quake // Sunday's Quake
Jacqueline Lyons
Review of Norman Finkelstein's The Ratio of Reason to Magic: New and Selected Poems
Andrew S. Nicholson