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Description
A fortune-teller once told her that she had
eyes made for crying and that there would be
sparrow-boned boys with fledgling sharp beaks
who would smell it on her. And they would peck
peck peck kisses on her eyelids and leave claw-prints
on her palms, leave tears welling in her eyes as they
soared.

She would forever be the branch, never the bird. Spring
could paint her sakura-pink and summer could coat her
in honey-amber sap but there would
always be an autumn, a winter, when
the geese would mark out arrows over
head, calling the birds to migrate to tropical
freckle-faced girls and pebble-beach-back
women, all sunshine all the time. But she was
a girl that waned and waxed, cycling through
the seasons, inhospitable in the late December
nights, frostbitten in the February fortnights.

She had eyes made for crying, watching lovers fall
from her fingers like leaves, flying to warmer climates
and exotic seas. She had eyes made for crying, when
she fell in love with a magpie-eyed boy too hard, a
precious fledgling who had been pushed out of the
nest by a greedy cuckoo, who had yet to learn how to
use his wings. And he thought she sparkled with gold,
saw silver in her silver birch skin, diamond in her carbon
heart. And she held him throughout winter, both of them
alone in a world devoid of spring or sun or other lovers.

And when the snow began to thaw, she held him still, a
fully-grown magpie-boy with scissored shoulder-blades and
obsidian mouth. He watched the birds return, calling him
with flourishing songs. And still she held him, all treasure all
desperation all love and one night, when the moon hung engorged
like a fat cuckoo, he went to leap. But he never learned how to
fly and he dropped like an

iron weight and didn’t the fortune-teller tell her
she had eyes made for crying and that’s what she
did from then on.