trout

A Page Ever Coming

Jaimie Gusman

We likes to write about birds.

Semipalmated Sandpipers, Bonaparte’s Gulls, & Pacific Loons.
 

We gives them names and the names of We reflect

various sexual positionings:

The Snowy Plover, the Common Moorhen, and the Pomarine Jaeger Dark Morph.
 

America’s anxiety of influence in bird culture:

The Virginia Rail, Forster’s Tern, and the Lesser Yellowlegs.
 

We: Western Kingbirds, Bohemian Waxwings, & Golden-crowned Kinglets.
 

In America We likes to write about wee birds

that fly into a poem easily as lint.

From poem to lint, to lint to lint.

We likes to think that these birds

haven't been dumbed down by We’s garbage,

We’s shit-talk, We’s atmosphere.



In America We likes to write about atmosphere

because We knows it is less scary to pretend to know

such an unknowable thing than for We to actually admit

We knows more about nothingness, dryer sheets, featherbeds:



birds     lint     atmosphere
 

Wilson’s Spine               Abert’s Towhee     Whip-poor-will



We moves slowly like the Asian Giant River turtles

humping one another.

It takes them hours to get off

the ship and to the Honolulu Zoo

where my sister says

"We has them in Florida, too"



or in We’s pockets, at the gift shop,

I remember the time I was shoplifting and didn't get arrested

or the time I was shoplifting and almost got arrested

then the time I was shoplifting and did get arrested



with all the birds eating the lint eating the atmosphere

I sat in the nothingness looking at the ink on my tiny thumb

and my tiny thumb on the white walls of a singular cell

built by We-men that make up a whole body of cells

and all I could think of was which We was hungry and which We was full of ink.



In America We puts birds into We’s poems

because We knows the human experience is so fragile,

Like We’s sugar stuck to the spoon like We’s own ashes

Made of said spoon and spun in said sugar.

Because We knows when a Toyota is coming We’s way.

We can see the big tires and taste the tar

and hear the anger in each spoked rotation.

We can smell We’s lungs burning down a forest.

And in We’s last moment We makes lint of We’s very self

so much so that the sky becomes We’s skin.

 

Every now and then We hears of a suicide among the birds.
 

the Lesser Black-backed Gull the Lincoln's Sparrow the American Goldfinch
 


We throws lint on their feathers

We lights up the sky with We’s thumbs

We writes a poem about birds and leaves the rest to the atmosphere.