Bird Burial

This poem, one of many morphing parts, is one limb of an exercise that friend, mentor, and professor Beazley Kanost and I are undertaking in which we consistently transform the poem from one state to the next; to put it plainly, she revised one of my poems and emailed it to me to revise and send back to her to revise and send back to me and so on and so forth; this particular version was about a dead bird my friend Chelsea and I came across in West Philadelphia, which we ended up providing a burial for.

Onward twin bright hands,
born through twin words,
ward the birdmelt into a soft mush.

Before and after a sidewalked dead bird.

Rivulets rushing against byways.
Steampipes intercepting steelcoats.

Hands crawl over their eyes, pour
into the leather at the sneakers' bottoms.
Hands crawl over treasure wails; stuff
felt only by toenails and fungi dance parties.

Answers in prayer; digits meshed.
Dirt clinging up to stretched stars.
The flame of the sun mutes and mutates,
and in the dark damp beneath bushes,
amidst the bushels of mulch grit,
twin defeathered wings brassed by noon.