When I was ten,
my mother changed my name.
Nothing improved.
She changed it back.


Could you confuse a crow
by conferring knowledge
of its crowness
unto itself?
Would it see its tail
for the first time
and question flight,

thus falling to a gutter
with no plan,
nor fare for the bus—
so hobbling to
a storm drain
to ask the alligators
how they get along?

Would it wonder if its
pinions should be crooked
into fingers
for smoking cigarettes,
and its beak smashed
into lips
for arguing politics?

Should a boy
hatch black down from
his flannelled breast,
tuck his feet to his belly
and caw
when his mother
kicks him from the porch;

then genuflect, confused,
to black murders
tossed in winding arcs?
Would he flutter to a
rose window
to ask the angels
how they get along;

surrender cap guns
and chocolate cake
for a barn-beam nest
out of the rain?
Or remember his feet,
where he left his bike,
and ride off to the park?

Gavin W Sisk