It is Friday night
       

across the whole Midwest.
The girl senses the fathers

are half drunk, clanging
in garages, and the brothers

are mean-grinned beneath
high school bleachers,

the stars above them invisible
in stadium lights. The girl has come

alone to the train tracks
because she knows things

grownups don't know,
or have forgotten, and she needs

the quiet, the smell
of creosote, to think.

About how roots
are upside-down trees hidden

underground; how light
so alive it can stop a heart

courses through wires
that connect our houses together;

how her body leaves cells
in a swirl behind her, marking

the world where she walks;
how catching a bird with salt

on its tail is a grandmother's
lie. But what they don't tell you

is a kid can become a bird
just by looking hard enough

at the trees, where right now
the robins and blue jays are asleep,

curled on themselves
like shut-tight eyelids. The girl's wings

are awkward, but strong enough
to lift her, and her feathers are clean

and smell like snow. She flaps until
she's over the graveyard at the edge

of town. If her mother came looking
she would find the girl, a purple night bird,

perched on a marble headstone, listening
to the dead dream of what they had

and ignored when they were alive:
the tang of mint, the sound of a violin,

the birds that were everywhere,
everywhere, around them.

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Copyright © 2022 Jeffrey Bean All rights reserved
from Connecticut River Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission