Joys

I pushed out a baby bird with a broken ribcage and wings that were another pair of legs, complete with claws. It didn’t breathe at all this turkey vulture, though I loved it for all its deformities. I loved it because it would never know the joy of flight —even if my birth canal hadn’t crushed its wispy bones. Because everyone had bought me strollers and diapers and socks that didn’t match, I felt I had disappointed them with a stillbirth. A stillbirth of a turkey vulture, whose second pair of legs we splayed and nailed to our barn doors as if that would say this whole fiasco was a joke. But it wasn’t. When I held that turkey vulture, stiff as though it had been dead for months, the afterbirth stuck in its feathers, I picked its molting down and knew such a song couldn’t be sung with a hammer and nail.