Consider the Dove a Bird of Prey
by Julie Triganne
I was cast as the dove in a church recital:
“I am the dove of Christ.” Five years old,
I held a paper-plate bird. If the dove means salvation,
reconsider salvation. Pluck feathers from the gravy.
Watch flood waters abate; they birth a cruise ship,
full of cheeky music. Doves eat debris by the shoreline.
I’ve only ever wanted to try. If we sacrifice the lamb,
why not the dove? Coins from doves’ beaks
don’t settle income tax. Our debtor won’t forgive.
But he’ll sit with us, tell stories of heartbreak:
his unfaithful wife, how he followed the man
she cheated with, beat him with a stepladder
behind the Scores in Lasalle. Everyone who gets it
earns it. Doves fly into wise men’s mouths.
Say “trespass,” word of wire fences, serpents
in the syllables. I burn jewels for you.
A dove nested in my ear. When it cooed too hard,
I drank with my brother-in-law at a restaurant
on Newman. We did shots though it wasn’t the kind
of place people do shots in. He had a new baby;
“the high pitch,” he said, “vibrations fuck with my head.”
We cut our losses after the kitchen closed, dragged
our dreary bodies back to our lives. For pleasure,
my mom plays a game she calls “let’s race the train.”
When red lights flash and the gates lower, she guns
her Subaru’s engine. “If you die on the tracks,”
I tell her, “I’m not paying for any funeral doves.”
Lift your eyes to the hills—birds on a wire mean
birds on a wire. Dove-coloured light a kind of toxin.
Our intentions didn’t take. Tactless as a bird eye,
we are who we say we are. At twenty-seven I woke up,
my mind void of doves. I washed myself sober,
enough perfume for days. I rose-watered my throat.
Hunger’s a thin salvation but I’ll lord it anyway.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Creator photo by Dimana Radoeva
Julie Triganne is a poet from Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). She is completing her MA in Creative Writing at Concordia University and is the current poetry editor of Headlight Anthology.