Two Poems

Studies of a Dead Bird

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Childhood warned me
not to turn dead animals

into drama—in tire tread
or skillet, it was all

supposed to be meat. Still,
I mimicked the sparrow’s

indigestible call every day
until I found its rawboned frame

flattened into jerky at the curb.
I wanted to back-weave

together the fibers of its old throat,
splayed like hairs on a broken bow.

No song can reverse dying,
lifetimes wasted writing

fruitless voodoos. But it’s human
to believe I can raise the dead.

Even now, I’m prying back some bird
by its oily wing-edge, bones as thin

as thread, as breath, searching
for a song that will work.

Sky-Swallowed

Sky burial, an Eastern funerary practice, is known as jhator in Tibet, meaning “giving alms to the birds.”
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1

When your skin is smoke-hued, it’s ready.
Fixed inside a version of yourself, you’re expecting
splendor—juniper-scented mantras seeping soft
into your freshly parched pores. Instead, the body-
breakers dig in, slice open the palms of your feet
as you nuzzle the dirt. They laugh and gossip
when they dissect your meat upward, as if it were
just another casual labor. You linger patiently.

2

This is what you paid for: Buddha’s
celestial butchers to separate your skeleton
from its beef, and the sky to devour it. Vultures
are coaxed onto your palatable frame, hungering.
They feast on bloodied complexion, tear off
the pulp from your jaw and throat. It feels like
a good, clean shave—worth every penny. You’ve
never felt the wind through your teeth before.

3

The body-breakers harvest what’s left of you, beat
down each bone and process it with pantry trimmings.
Buttered and barleyed, you have been disassembled
generously, your body now tantric and excarnal.
Your essence rests easy in the stomachs of birds.
Raw and unfeathered, you fly—no grave will keep you
from your next biology. You’re satisfied with the wild
you have become.

4

Now it’s the image of your uncooked body that haunts
me, instead of this one—prepped and redecorated, made
permanent in black oak for the living’s sake. All eulogy
drowns beneath the thundering thrum of a vulture’s
wingspan, its dragon cries for carrion. Even with an open
casket, my dead will never escape like you. Here’s all
that I can offer: an empty prayer as I stare blankly
at covered feet—uncut, I imagine, and uneaten.