Lizzy Burnam 🐞

I am the wood mouse of America. I am the blackbird snatched from the marsh. I am the child with a virus in her belly, carried to the fern-bed under canopies of evergreen. Can birds of prey pray to forget? Does god answer everyone except me? 

Raptor, rapture, rape. I’ve only seen an eagle once in person, confined in a flight cage at the zoo. But the vultures circle slow and silent like a dark cloud, ignoring state lines, ignoring taxonomical rank. 

That’s the kind of freedom I’d fight for: to eat death; to soar on the winds of the dead’s final breath; to lay the memory to rest and say nothing.