Buzzard

by Jaycee Billington

Buzzard

The language of buzzards
     is a slow cursive:
lazy, looping, skating cumulo
     nimbus vowels
and tilted Ts, a round glide
     that mimics the curve
of bald heads. It’s not messy,
     this openness,
the cyclical return to grace.
     So often the language
of death is harsh, all
     consonants, hard
edges unsoftened by
     the feathered drift
of wing, the throaty
     weightlessness.
It’s a beautiful scrawl,
     this gentle handwriting,
the way it only goes up
     in wide spirals.
Its comfortable, the un
     hurried, scumbling
curve. I want this slurred
     transition, the tradition
of a buzzard’s unending
     swerve between earth
and sky, that transitory space
     where nothing is hidden
and the utilitarian
     baldness of the birds
in their delve is up
     against our every instinct
to keep ourselves covered.
     God, is it just death
we fear, or ugly words,
     dirty plumage, an uneasy
shift of the wind? What tidiness
     is found belowground?
How much nicer, to know shame
     is remiss, and when claimed,
can be devoured,
     can be delicious.

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Poet Jaycee Billington, from Folkston, Georgia, lives and teaches in Spartanburg, SC as an adjunct at Wofford and Converse Colleges. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is glad to be back in the land of BBQ. Her work appears in Plain China, Hotel Amerika, West Trade Review, Appalachian Review, and The Atlanta Review. She is the winner of a Wilson Award for excellence in writing.

Artist PM Flynn is an eastern North Carolina writer and photographer. He holds a B.S. in English from East Carolina University in Greenville, NC and has been published in many fine print and online anthologies, newspapers, and literary magazines. Resource Publications published Flynn’s first book, Shadows on Moss.