Comes whole and clear into the eye
the sine curve of an upright pigeon
sat like a totem (pigeon head, pigeon eye unmoving)
on an orange traffic cone
upright in the bed of a utility truck,
the truck curving (whitely as water
against the curve of a porcelain sink)
through the parking lot of this fast-food place
where flies wash their heads like penitents.
The bird does not alter stance
(its wings the shining contained riot
color of mother-of-pearl)
as the truck—gray bird still wedded to orange cone—
lumbers juddering onto the street and bears
the nesting bird away. Not seen
if the driver’s fat tanned arm out the window
is attached to a man who knows
gestation attempts persevere
on an orange cone behind his head,
a man whose daughter, six maybe,
this morning jumped off the porch
on her way to school and maybe caught the glint
of the pinpoint eye
focused only on brooding; saw
the funny bird sitting a funny nest
in her daddy’s power-truck
he drove home illegally after a hard day—
and she knew for pretty much certain the egg
couldn’t thrive if unbalanced from cone—
but if she told him would the bird be
routed with a swat (Or could it be
maybe he knows his gray jewel
and drives stately all day like a Brinks tout—
the possibility of egg given
what she had no word for: grace?)
Mary Elizabeth Parker’s essay “Combat Boots” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry collections include The Sex Girl, Urthona Press, and four chapbooks: Miss Havisham In Winter, FutureCycle Press; Cave-Girl, Finishing Line Press; Breathing In a Foreign Country, Paradise Press, and That Stumbling Ritual, Coraddi Publications, University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poems have appeared in journals including Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Gettysburg Review, New Letters, Arts & Letters, Confrontation, Madison Review, Phoebe, Passages North, and Greensboro Review (nominated for a Pushcart Prize); and in Earth and Soul, an anthology published in English and Russian in the Kostroma region of Russia. She is creator and chair of the Dana Awards in the Novel, Short Fiction, and Poetry.