April Michelle Bratten

April Michelle Bratten is a writer currently living in North Dakota.  She has upcoming work to be featured in The Orange Room Review and Boston Literary Review.  She is the co-editor of the literary zine Up the Staircase (www.upthestaircase.org)

"13 Birds"

There is a yard,
somewhere,
where 13 birds all gave up at once.

They just tucked in their beaks
and gave up their will
to death.

Her mother found them,
little piles of crunchy bones
stacked in neat little rows.

She was told not to go there
because the disease was catching,
and a dead anything
was not for this child's eyes.

But she ran down that grass
with no shoes on,
and she did have a smile like syrup

when she stepped on
a white bone
cupped in a bed of black black black.

That bone splintered off in brittleness
and pulped that perfectly plump foot.

Her shout
must have sprang out
like a fierce heart inside a pocket,

but she knew she wasn't dead yet,

and she wanted just a white fearless pang,
a color,
that would finally touch her bird-less sky.