Bird Eating Bird Read Online Free Page B

echo.
    O, we talk on the phone!
    Outside a chainsaw’s teeth devour the skin
    of the faded tree, the wheels of its gut, rings of moonlight.
    The reappearance of Heather Green is imminent.
    On the phone, she talks about orange-blossom-flavored
    tarts she leaves cooling in Adam’s window.
    From yolk an iodine-soaked appendage is scheduled
    to be birthed from the silky insides of my cast.
    Quiet as an egg we end without talking.
    A new leg to grow back where the cast finally quits
    and our good friends, the toes, cork off the ends.

I remember well the well where I drew water.
    — Loretta Lynn

HOUSE
    1.
    Everybody lives in a house. The same house but with different trees. Each house finishes at the roof, with a chimney, and antenna for feeding pictures into the TV. Inside is a living room with a wooden floor, or maybe some carpet. And outside, grass sits in the yard thick as carpet. Every house has two or more beds, depending on how many children, or how many relatives live there, how big the beds are. There’s also a kitchen, a bathroom, and a place beside the grass to park the car.
     
    A house has houses all around it. You can drive on a street between the houses until you reach the highway, or into the next town Arlington, Virginia, where houses are dotted between Miller’s Music Spot and Whitey’s Broasted Chicken Restaurant. In Arlington people sit on their steps outside of their houses, or on folding chairs along their small grassy carpets. And I say, “Look at the people in those houses,” and my father says, “Those aren’t houses, Sweetie. They’re shacks.”
     
    2.
    House is a five-letter word. It is pronounced /aus/, /aüs/, or /aüz/.
     
    Looking at these phonetic spellings, you’d probably say, But wait! What have you done with my ‘h’? Where has that chimneystack, cleft of a letter gone to?
     
    And, Nowhere, I say. Nowhere, trying to comfort you. ‘h’ is breathed, not said. A change of direction. A thread of air pulled up your windpipe, expulsion from the gut and lungs. Oh! Oh ‘h’! I say, you make health out of wealth, house of a louse, a home of Rome—just conceiving it. The heart and the earth—by the way the wind blows.
     
    3.
    I say the word house and a beautiful image stirs in your head. Like this, House. And then poof! The beautiful image stirring in your head. Yes, how beautiful it is with its chimney and windows and front door lowing. How wonderful to house such a beautiful house in your head. How wonderful and immaterial to be a sketch in a bubble that flutters inside you!
     
    4.
    Once the word house sentenced, “There was a brick house on Macon Avenue.” And whenever those words sentenced together, sounds soaked like a bruise, black and blue between them. And though sounds dousing one another wasn’t anything new, nor injured no word in particular, still words—as they were known to do—blamed this word and that for their ruin.
    Avenue: “Macon, your ‘n’ is leaving ink clouds, my ‘A’ dyed blue.”
    Macon: “Get over it, Avenue. Even capitalized you’re common.”
    The two words nubbed on, ‘n’ bleeding across the dignified Avenue, while house stood silent—never mind brick leeching the space between them with color. When one day, Macon pitted them against each other.
    Macon: “House, have you noticed your stomach growing wider? The round sounds of house filling the mouth whenever you two are mentioned together.”
    And house was confused. Or just uncommonly distraught when she faced up to brick to ask her:
    House: “Brick. Do you notice I’m hardly myself? Just a mass of round sounds. An ‘ouse when I sit to one side of you.”
    Brick: “House, don’t blow your stack. Your head’s in the clouds again.”
    House, yet more confused and not as well-mannered as everyonethinks—she’s often mistaken for home, her cousin, known as a charming host who throws great parties—chewed out words she’d later regret.
    House: “ Brick house, they say about