Bird Prey

I turn off my dating app,
and watch as all the boys start to
slowly disappear, dwindling
text messages fall off slowly,
like letters off a cliff,
and I’m up against this
blank space, the bulletproof chest
of my heart, and I want to cry

for my grandfather,
because Italian families don’t speak
their eyes
go dead
in the millisecond
blunt of a knife,
cutting cake
on grandmom’s birthday

or you think you go dead but really,
love and not-love sit in the socket swabs of your bleeding eyes,
and eat away at your brown paper burning edges

So what do you do? You
become a scarecrow, stuffed with old newspaper
choked all the way up to your throat

All I can say is,
I’m sorry. It took too long to get there and I’ve got too far to go.
Let me sew on my arm doll limbs dangling
at the joints,
crooked knees bent and
hanging over a counter,
sitting at the edge,
eyes plucked out in crooked,
piercing-black,
like the mating gangs of grackles,
screaming in empty parking lots

By Elissa Calamia

Biography:

Elissa Calamia currently lives and works in Austin, TX with her boyfriend and Dalmation. She is grateful of the cities in which she has called home, which continue to shape the lens of her world.