Clothes
hangers fly in my father's chest
Like
steel skeletal birds,
His
heartbeat dangling from their looping beaks
And
their wire wings flexing in his veins.
Or
they are the sinking shadows of crows,
Black
bodies peppering the congestion,
The
gurgling pumping of their limbs
Propping
up fraying walls of tissue and blood.
An
albatross carries my father's heart on wings
Slowing
and slumping in the blood and brine.
All
birds must land and all lives must end,
But
the earth can never take him from me.
