By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

After El Paso

we expect at sunset/that flocks will swirl/in the pink and lavender/of dusk, its unisons and calm/a diverse murmur of wings/a coiling dance, high over head

Xavier writes me about something amiss/a chaos in flight, dark bodies colliding, a clapcloud pandemonium/a wretched sky pining after a mythology/of metaphysical prominence, props for the preened/how the vanishing point of long highway road forces us to look up, to take in the snarl and holy mess of molecular percussion/teeth of feathers interrupting/flight paths charted out against maps and before/pinions were known to catch migrating wings/the bristle of vanes

in the machinery’s grind and coil/we thought it was the noonday sun blinding us/as it fell once again at the end of the world/a red pinwheel hibiscus spinning down jouncing/a short burst fire close enough to the border to hear ice crackle in the heat of concentrations/enter the fiction that all birds in a flock are Birds/enter the meticulous design of epidermal violence/the hierarchy of feathers/the tyranny of skin

enter the crow that will kill a crow if it does not arrive already citizen to the flock/if it bursts in with a foreign caw and sweat/congregating spring of paperless strangers/in the solace of numbers/portrayed as a corvid conspiracy

a crow in a crow’s nest of country flag and white/an improvised blind/pitching out sounds/picking pecking

we want the flock/to round and round/murmur of wings readying toward night

but we find a chaos, dark bodies colliding in pandemonium/a ruckus of rounds feeding death mid-flight

a caw in echo bouncing off the force of blue, a vaunt of dominion in a wretched sky

---

heidi andrea restrepo rhodes is a queer, Colombian/Latinx, poet, artist, scholar, & activist. Her poetry collection The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) was selected by Ada Limón for the 2018 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. A 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and 2018 VONA alum, her poems have been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets, Raspa, Feminist Studies, & Huizache, among other places.