I’m used to washing things easily down
my throat but the feathers are dry
and the barbs are fraying, and I don’t have
a drink strong enough to drown out
the taste. I think this must be the taste of clouds,
of human tears wrapped around
airplane exhaust. I can feel his beak scraping
the whole way down. He’s going so slowly I
cough and sputter up more feathers; I pray
he won’t puncture my liver before
dropping into my stomach where he latches
his claws into the lining, and now he’s just
flapping around in there, cawing and crying,
and I’m feeding him a daisy chain of sunflower
seed-shaped pills, which I swallow in gulps
with topsoil and sunshine to leave him a trail
he can follow up my esophagus and there spread
his wings out of my mouth. If he doesn’t take
the bait, I’ll give him some more time. Maybe the pills
will sprout some kind of happiness or actual sunflowers
right there inside my body. I would just as soon take
a knife to my abdomen, fit the blade into my navel
like a key, give it a hard turn at a ninety degree angle
to open up and let all those living things back out
into the sunshine, into the soft air and pillowy grass
where they belong. And I might bleed out, I might
dye red all of the chlorophyll and black feathers
and there, on the ground, be an empty birdcage
with the iron gate still open.
Ashlyn Sharp is an undergraduate student of creative writing at Utah State University. This is her first publication in a literary journal, and she is overjoyed to make her debut with Whale Road Review. Follow her on Twitter @ashjenn6.