Winter

Dorothy Albertini
· in ,

Farm fingers found a carcass in the chicken coop. A hawk had had it, left it there for later. He scooped up slow, hands spread wide for the bird, and walked it back out to the driveway.

This you could rip apart, one wing at a time, one bone from a bird, bone after bone off a bird. You’d see the moon when it came up. Down in the village men are screening football and calling it film. Women painting panels black, carving mouths into alabaster. A dog gets shot in the dark some- times too.

He rips it slow and good, all the sounds of the ripping, all the tendons of the contraption, all the sun across the winter on his one straight drive from the road. A hawk will come back but he’ll find something different.

Topics: ,
Dorothy Albertini received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2008 and has been a Fellow at the MacDowell Arts Colony and Wellspring House. Her fiction and poetry appear in Chronogram, Shifter, textsound, Tantalum, Dog Under Porch, and Milk Money. She teaches at Bard College’s satellite campuses in New York State prisons and co-curates Bard’s Roving Reading Series.