Yellow Mama E zine

The Many Birds My Love Has Been

 

by Richard Allen Taylor

 

          After Meg Hutchinson

 

She sings about loving as the crow flies.

It never occurred to me, until the song,

that the love fluttering in my chest

 

might be a bird. I suppose it’s possible

that at an early age it flew like a crow—

straight to Mother, but that would have been

 

pure instinct. After that, a lot of zigzagging.

More starling than crow. In adolescence

it seemed more like a chicken.

 

Let’s just say it was a chicken. Love’s awkward

attempts at flight squawked and flapped through

the short arc of my teen years. Love tried on

 

other feathers—robin, eagle, sparrow—trying

to decide what it wanted to be. It learned

to circle overhead and perch on power lines.

 

Once, it repeatedly flew into a glass door until

it lay broken on the porch. It found another mate. 

Those two flew together for over thirty years. 

 

When the other love flew beyond the rim of the sky,

mine went back to flying solo. A heron now, it skywrites

wide, slow loops in the blue, swoops at opportunities

 

that turn out to be decoys or reflections. It has moved

its nest from the treetop to one close to the ground.

It doesn’t dwell on crows anymore, or how they fly.  

 

 

       Richard Allen Taylor is the author of four poetry collections including Letters to Karen Carpenter and Other Poems (2023) from Main Street Rag Publishing Company.  His poems, articles and reviews have appeared in Aeolian Harp, Flying South, Litmosphere, Pinesong, Tar River Poetry, Rattle, and Sheila-Na-Gig Online, among others. Several of his poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. He formerly served as review editor for The Main Street Rag and founding co-editor of Kakalak. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and currently resides in Greer, South Carolina.

 

Bernice Holtzman’s paintings and collages have appeared in shows at various venues in Manhattan, including the Back Fence in Greenwich Village, the Producer’s Club, the Black Door Gallery on W. 26th St., and one other place she can’t remember, but it was in a basement, and she was well received. She is the Assistant Art Director for Yellow Mama.