Pigeon Song I
By Hannah Wyatt

I glower in the purple dark, watch in awe
the film where adults become orphaned in their stony square
houses, sun setting in the east. Something is fetid wrong here.
When the carrier pigeon arrives it delivers me the wound –
Your father will die tonight
And for once I feel breath move through me.
When I zoom out, the pigeon is a bump in the center of a golden field,
its feathered iridescence dream, my heart
flutter – neck gyrating back and forth,
back and forth. The cooing quiver like a baby I could love.

Pigeon: tell me something new. Deliver me some more good omens. 
My life has nearly just begun. 

Pigeon Song II: Pigeon: won’t you deliver me from

my horrors? Weren’t you a dove all along?
Place your claw in my dirty hand. I’ll rewrite history with you. I’ll 
throw rocks in the sea with you, tell no one of your heavy-bodied
love, the muted gyrations of your core, your head
which bears no seam. How can you be so soft? Pigeon: 
when you told me I could be anything, even a rockstar, even a villain, 
I believed you - yes, there in the damp grass, staining my kneecaps
chartreuse, while I cried my motherless love
and the architectures of the city swirled me into drool-good stupor. Pigeon:
won’t you deliver me from my horrors? 
They’re my own doing after all. 

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Hannah Wyatt (she/her) is a multi-genre writer and artist from West Virginia. She holds an MFA in fiction from West Virginia Wesleyan College, and her work appears in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Pinch, L’Esprit Literary Review, Maudlin House, Drizzle Review, and more. Learn more at hannahwyattwriter.com.

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Artwork Source: “The Princess Dwells in the Oak Tree Where ye Wild Pigeons Come to Feed Her,” by Howard Pyle. From the Public Domain.