“Bird”

“I’ll slit your throat while you sleep, son”

So prophesized the whiskey-clouded beast.

So spun the wheels 

in the attic of the 5-year-old boy.

Eyes shuttered shut, he wraps moth-feasted sheets 

tight around his sweaty neck, the sweetest noose.

He doesn’t know what else to do.

He isolates in the space that follows the stumbling tread on creaky stairs.

Sincere efforts work to counteract this doom.

A Chicago winter in December, 1949

flutters her snowflaked tresses through the walls, blankets the boy in numb.

While in New York, in 1945, Charlie Parker’s fingers raced along a saxophone,

such that now, in 1949,

a Be-Bop blanket of sound bounces from a radio, flies through the air.

This, too,

armors the shivering boy,

such that when the beast (finally) dies,

the boy becomes a man, thawed from the freeze, ready for flight.

—Emily Romano