9.2 / February 2014

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.


Brian Clifton lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he walks most everywhere he goes. He knows two magic tricks: 1) turning a hand into a hand AND 2) turning the hand back into a hand. His work can be found in: Meat For Tea, Juked, burntdistrict, The Dirty Napkin, and others.
9.2 / February 2014

MORE FROM THIS ISSUE