NIGHT SHIFT IN THE BIRD FACTORY

by Victoria Korth

I am making bird-strike reducing window adhesives, not birds.
There is no need to make birds, but to unmake that which kills birds.

Expanses of glass, especially modest, four-story dwellings
in lush surroundings, Club Med, Costa Rica or Gaspe Bay. Imagine

the featureless ocean beneath a clouded night-sky, swirling lights,
the resistance and pull of magnetic North, necessity: food, rest, time's

absolute constraint. The heart rate must slow, the nest be constructed,
the song sung. Then confusion and the unmistakable thud.

I search the pachysandra around the house, lift the trailing hydrangea,
and find her—pale tangerine feathers glassy as silk.

She is panting, hunching her right shoulder, flicking the wing. 
I lower my hand as if doing tai chi, close it over a weightless warmth.

Towel, box, a quiet corner. Later, with relaxed fingers
I straighten one unbroken wing, then the other.

Her beak is closed now, her head tipped to the side as she looks up.
For the second time I lift her, open my palm.

Victoria Korth is the recipient of the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, 2021 Streetlight Poetry prizes, and others. Poems have appeared in Nine Mile Magazine, Stone Canoe, Broad River Review, Ocean State Review, Tar River Poetry, LEON Literary Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Barrow Street and widely elsewhere. The author of two chapbooks, Cord Color (Finishing Line Press 2015) and Tacking Stitch (2022). She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers and an MA in Creative Writing from SUNY Brockport.