from I WOULD BE THE HAPPIEST BIRD

CANADIAN GEESE

No sun for a week and I have not left the house. I order olive pizza. I sit on the internet for hours. I refuse phone calls. I intensify in my solitude because commerce is scaring me again. Bored & lumbering stores gray and disorientated from coffee and coumadin after the holidays. No one wants a new car, or the slovenly gas they have to pour into it. The homogenous fumes treated with RBGH, ithe demotic radio faze of paranoia after a school shooting in Connecticut. Everyone is unhappy while our conservative relatives preach against the produce aisle. Everyone looks like they might stab someone in the parking lot, but the bedazzled cross hanging from the rearview mirror stops most folks from cutting out their own blood clots. The doctor has their bloodwork ready, so why should they worry. Doctors know everything. Even other doctors. This is probably where I should precast smoke about looking up and seeing the Canadian geese flying in their iconic V ( or maybe in a slapdash of pink cured ribbon) over the highway as a successfully sanctimonious market strategy of hope or freedom. I always look at them. I cant help it because I would rather be a bird than a human being. Its a penny into a wishing well at the mall, an aquiline kid holding an iron boot with water coming out. Were encouraged to rest here between shopping fits & wipe our kids noses, watching the slow yarning of mallwalkers gain lap after lap. Ive seen some of the same people here for 20+ years, the written wishes of captive birdteeth squeaking shark fights onto the styrofoam. It might be the consonant grip of a last song, a bargaining plea, an irregular spark in the thunder map, a torrential seedling. Ill gather up all of our coins just to get us the hell out of here. Then we can meet somewhere & talk honestly about our situations.

BLUE JAY

Everyone hates you because youre supposed to steal eggs from other birds and eat them. I grew up around people who would call you an Indian giver, even though it was the pilgrims, not the Wampoang, who initiated one of the first treacheries on plymouth rock. So Im putting you in there, too. Like the crows and ravens. Birds striated for a fabricated pretense. Living so close to the Joshua trees your bed must be within their dogparked guidebook of regional appropriation. How the multiplex theaters lease a myth for every abundancy season so anything movable in the woods must die. We are the underclass of the food chain, I tell my family as the air show jets fly over, the three of us digging for carrots. Once a year they like to pretend venison is a staple food so they can legally shit themselves in the woods. When they get home from the cabin some of them vote for people who believe in the illegality of plants. All of this affects a proper mending. (When I have finished a decent amount of mending, I will be better at helping with the mending.) Theres a lot of stories tucked into the heads they have cut off. Luckily their wives will be home to make it presentable.

CARDINAL

Look at the cardinal outside , says my grandmother, mother , mother in law, father in law, son, husband. I have not heard a friend in the city say it yet. Ive been influenced by a family that values birds. The pope has resigned today, the first one in over 600 years & and I see the birdfeeder is empty. The red birds who ignore him because hes anyone. Or like doves, they are behind his resignation. Its not a hot day and I wish it was because I am bleeding and I want everything to be red instead of plugging it up with cotton. Red as in a skirt I wore once. Red like the first time you realized foundations could be vibrant. Once there were many many slave ships & sometimes pirates would steal them, chasing the ignominy for days, and when they caught it, a serious sustained magic happened. My spouse says lightning recently struck the Vatican while he was giving a speech. About the same time Shulamith Firestone was decribed as having enough rage to fuel a revolution. But beautiful spider, I am cupped in bloodbook making, a fire journal from 1926.Where women were always on ships, and the crew was multi-racial. His red & gold fasting visor. all the children they have stolen. Would you offer them a safehouse? Im writing/staking violets from room to room, through the internet taxons, looking for friends.

SEAGULL

Its how they twist in the wind. Were giving them gorgeous whets of bread again on a Monday when I have a stomachache from thinking about the popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird. The lawyer always pissed me a little. The upkeep refurbishing ,the perfect myopic storm because were supposed to be beyond state sanctioned mob brutality. Were talking law in college but not even camping near the newest version of jim crow. Part of it is keeping payroll safe, the walls breathing because you are breathing. It was never a drug free school zone anyway because the archeologists aglet bow tie was packed w/cocaine bylaws from the neighborbood watch. I was one of the precocial ones who didnt want to put the dog down after she attacked another dog. So you said you liked my face in the morning before it dried into its mask of survivor rialto after a night sleeping on digerati platforms. Throat noise, then spookiness, a counterclockwise test site of fidelity. They are expert scavengers & I wonder if thats why you are punishing him. (when the lake decides to partake were only an edgewise away.) But if you mess with an environmentalists straw bale house, they get mean. She doesnt like to be reminded that social disputes arent going to be solved by a town hall meeting. Then again, maybe I hide & bitch too much.

WOODPECKER

Good morning, sacred heart. How can I help you? The hair salons are ready to shape w/ sweet oil so I will be dishy for the bloodmobile. I am currently studying how people say or mouth I love you. (Some are transfusions, some are not.) Its the woodpecker again, opening a vein. Hes an expert in his buffy coat because he broke his stethoscope, now he asks me questions like why do I cry when I let people in? is it part of a new age detoxification process? its where they park during lunch hour. Near all the worlds libraries you will find em fashioning birthing centers, my heels pin pricked from the last bloodline take-away. Weve all been there, the waiting room tapered with the stampede of being polite, the Minnesota nice nurses chinning in their cubicle stays. Her appointment is for Wednesday at nine oclock & you might have to take us inside for the last time.

RED WING BLACKBIRD

To name a city Lynchburg theres bound to be menus of all varieties of blackened bird wings. You dont want to hear this, she says, rolling the margarita machine during campus happy hour. His evening apple bobs, faking good girl credit for the card reward points. Here, joey joey. Shortening her name. Once there was a boy. Then he was a fan & she wiped her hands on an apron after the eggs were finished. You might wonder about a butcher. Was he wearing a winter suit or a summer suit? Scissors in the delivery room, scissors in the farming pile. ( Mayor Hoggins has mounds of paperwork. Good thing Mary Lou is wearing that wiggle dress again. Will she be at the barbecue later? ) Poetry as divination through a CB radio. For that price, that truth, Ive found a plumose antennae breaking through the static doze, high-cab, Form ties with some of them & we have an ourselves an underground railroad. ( Im thinking ahead again, folks). Mrs. Jenkins made the most divine lemonade for the town luncheon today &I hope they hang him first because Im like, starving .Shes grounded because she asked the teacher why we werent studying African-americans during history class so Dad totally freaked but shes coming today since Daddy Says we are witnessing the taking back of american history . To name a city Custer they also put their menus on the outside of their restaurants. I dont see how people can get away with this, she says, her humanely glazed college wreath slipping over one eye.

from HOUSES

PINK HOUSE

Pink houses are nice. A nice house. A red worm shitting berries. A baby magnolia tree. A homing marrow. An ardorous alley twirl. New pink hightops, we have a new neighbor. A colony of mottled ants. A busty shoelace. A bus is breaking a beep. A comb of car plumes, with or without highstepper. He said if I was 30 years younger he would be sayin hello. Pink leather seat on a motorcycle. An underwire bra Im going to repair so I shove you on top or bottom drawer. A nice yard with a firepit. A baked chicken. An old whiskey barrel grunting. Pink little farms teased up and down your arms. Sailboats, of course. We dream about sailboats. And tugboats as red as knees, chameleon lay. He says I basilisk in the sun, blackish tongue w/ a pink lady apple, walking to the bus stop. Chalked croup hearts on the boarded up pink house. A possible home. A cat with a kitten whine. Dandelion greens for supper. Creeping charlie curving around my ankles, a purple canella teat. Certainly a homebody. Certainly an estranged somebody, tearing pink in the spring. I cannot post how flowers yell, but how was my babys day at school? Brown /pink cheeks of children weather. A crisis messed mother, but moving right along. vote tropes of the same old hopes. girls blogging a picture of a displaced koala. Seagull salon overheard. And a nice house for you, a pink house, two family house, nice yard, a chokecherry tree in back for the kids to climb.

BLUE HOUSE

A blue house where water is responsible for all of our thinkings. In the desert water is choosy, in the oases the palms are large and loud, chatter, piss, food. Clatter, room, lick. Sit on the toilet and read to me while Im in the tub. I sit and rub the cat who licks from the faucet, she prefers water to be running into her, not placid meniscus like a dog pillow by the fireplace. He sleeps without frills, in the water bubble, but plenty of cat paws cat heads we ask politely to leave the room Afterwards we read the diaper papers of our times. Warm feather water eased by pain and window of fogged glass blocks, you can hear the mens walking by. Once in a while we will hear someone say I saw something its a bathroom Its a bathroom window, a naked woman hope, being all hot, hair pinned up. An agreeable romance cutting through the yard but no, its usually you or me or the youngun playing with blue dinghys and splashing bumble trucks I say did you wash your Body properly with the washrag I gave you. Here are your pajamas its time to go to bed now that you are damp from your bath maybe youll dream about tadpoles .

GREEN HOUSE

Steam house. Spring before grass cutters, the best time. Thick before drought and angry man management, he must gut the grass on the weekends, imagine the scandal if not. What will the neighbors think, I think nothing. Dont bother. Dont bother the sod, push mower. Go green. Go green with upcycled link purses, I am that auctioner w/ other epidurals made possible to me in part by gas. So he gets out his lawn mower anyway, paints his house in acceptable olive, not green, green like new grass, that would be too confrontational, too many risks of dandelion patty cake. City citation says no food gardens allowed on front lawns, city citation says I cant puff naked across my lawn. what will the neighbors think about my hairs. Maybe you shouldnt be bothered by looking. Nonsense, says man in powdered bone who believes in modified tomatoes, but green tomatoes are good.Without his placards. Behind the scenes people make recipes out of green things, make livings out of weeds wild and cultivated just so, hidden somewhere. No dogs allowed in the secret counties, you have to know someone. Would angry man tell on the guerillas of green feet? Maybe so, maybe not Maybe he tried it in college and now offhandedly works networking parties playing I dont know what a bong is. We laugh. Oh, how we laugh and the quotas brighten, the death rows roll and the afternoon tea swells. Someone is getting arrested and grocery stores flash with broccoli. She is wearing a green house scarf as an american doing the foreign thing in an african country she was briefed on during the flight.

RED HOUSE

Not a schoolhouse for quaint-ification purposes, commemoration toward stationery seal. Not a genius either, a manhandling splice. La Cucaracha is a family friendly horn call and the owner of the car is pleased. I am pleased that he is pleased. Thats the point. Not a dye of fish patty per each Orwellian. Not a daughters of the revolution firetruck with a stuffed dalmatian knight rider, so the traffic of peeps past my house rap or sing. Its an urgent delivery past the concept of property lineage. Not the town and country quirky set spanking missionary style souffls. Not the gaff bell that frolics with the constitution. Not a focal point in the age of crust. An old madhouse is my self-esteem because the disinheritance is my inheritance. Not an Edith Wharton bookmark arranged in Trafalgar square for impulse fallout of a movement slogan. Not the mason-dixon trunk show for Clydesdale gallery night. Gallery as gallows. Not the patent leather seagull for a breast gene. The old boys love a girl for the old monopoly skin graft. My birth certificate proves that I can be taxed for buying labor supplies. Not my mothers indignation either, an online junk store. The point is presidents age by exchanging juried price tags. They like to win.

Nikki Wallschlaegers work has been featured in DecomP, Esque, Word Riot, Spork, Great Lakes Review and others. She lives in Milwaukee, WI and considers the Midwest one of the best playgrounds to live in, where all the worst bullies and the best lovers live, all at once, arguing on the monkey bars over the wet cement. You can reach her at nikkiwallschlaeger@gmail.com.