the blueshift journal

  

—what my Polish grandmother meant was stick
with your own kind. You can eat crow’s breast (first incise
an X over the heart), but the meat tastes like charcoal. 
A lone rook caws from the pines—in Gaelic, he’s a roc;
in Sanskrit, a kruc—crying out. In

 

my grandmother’s dreams, a wrona. Where the bird
lands on her shoulder—makes her a shewel, a straw-
woman wrapped in colorful rags—
propped up in grain-sown fields. She can’t remember
how to terrify. She remembers Jim Crow—
 

in Latin, crow opens from crepare, to creak and clatter—
she told a black woman waiting for the bus,
in Płock, I was a gypsy, chased off walking paths. Rotted
apples thrown at her back. A grackle picking up
a core—he’s a hremm, a storm bird, one who helped
 

Cain slaughter Abel, the bird-thrown-from-a-ship
that led Vikings to a greener land, flying over
the young martyr’s bones—a dark eye for a blue eye, salt
in a woman’s hands. A woman spread-eagled to give
birth. A crake, a prophet of evil on a stone parapet.
 

Crow peelings, nga-pin in Cantonese, or opium—any drug
given to my blind grandmother who’s dying,
who is bathed by a young black nurse who finally finds
her expired. He says, I tried to close her eyes,
but the right one stayed open, a lone crow jagging

across the blue iris—