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Issue 16: | 1 Jan. 2023 |
Poem: | 374 words |
Newly fledged and lost the night of autumn equinox, a hummingbird slipped through my cabin door. She clung to the light fixture, sweeping the ceiling as if she’d descended from the spirit realm to teach me a lesson in housekeeping: always dust high windows before sweeping so dust won’t fall twice onto the floor. Her body rose and arched, a stained-glass shard twirling, a white-gold wedding band slipped around a luminous neck, her body incapable of existing without movement. I wanted to hold her within my camera’s lens, but she hurled herself toward the moon rising outside the skylight, brittle bones snapping glass, her wings losing radiance. She paced the ceiling’s apex, frantic as a bat. I dimmed lights, opened all windows except the one I couldn’t reach. I hung red hibiscus and sugar water on the porch, lifted a broom’s soft bristles to her, hoping she’d latch on, allow me to lift her out. The local wildlife expert said I must wait for her to starve and fall, sweep her body out the door. Who could bear a dead hummingbird? All night I lay awake, matching my heart rate, breath, metabolism to the bird’s torpor, hoping she’d last the dark hours. I wished she’d arrived as a common sparrow I once saw bearing souls across Etruscan burial grounds, turning on thermals, diving into graves, delivering spirits into the seam between cliff ridges and sky, her wings easeful as dawn releasing the earth from darkness. By dawn, the hummingbird dragged the cabin’s baseboards, sinking beneath the window I couldn’t reach, all lightness drained from her body. My body ached and unrested, I found a ladder decomposing into goldenrod behind the cabin. I leaned it below the impossible window, climbed, popped pane and screen. I stepped down, nudged the bird with the pink bud of my flashlight’s beam. She side-stepped the sill, as if unable to believe in air. A breeze fluffed night from her feathers until they shifted like light on falling water. She heaved herself out, becoming a green swirl among fluttering red and yellow leaves. I swept shadows off the porch, opening myself to autumn’s shifts as pines lifted river mists from the valley, releasing them into air.
newest book is Second Shift: Essays (Del Sol Press). She is the author of In the Garden of Stone (Hub City Press), winner of the South Carolina Novel Prize and a Gold IPPY Award. She’s also published two short-story collections: Savage Pilgrims (Serving House Books) and My Mother’s War Stories (Winnow Press), the latter of which received the 2004 Winnow Press fiction prize. Her web chapbook, Wash Day, appears in the Web Del Sol International Chapbook Series.
Her nonfiction, short stories, and essays have appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, New Letters, and Shenandoah. Selections from her photo essay, “White Blossoms,” appeared in Earth Hymn (Volume 6 of the KYSO Flash Anthology), with the full essay published online in Issue 12 of KYSO Flash.
Ms. Tekulve has received scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She teaches in the BFA and MFA writing programs at Converse University.
Author’s website: https://susantekulve.com/
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