Kristin W. Davis

Kristin W. Davis earned an MFA in poetry in 2022 from the University of Southern Maine, Stonecoast. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Nimrod, The Banyan Review, Passager and THINK and on the Split this Rock blog and Maine Public radio’s Poems from Here. Her work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize and earned the International Human Rights Arts Festival’s Creators of Justice Award.  Her website is kristinwdavis.com.

Brood Patch

She hover-squats over her eggs, body deep in a ring of twigs, beak and tail hanging over. Bald
of belly feathers, she warms her clutch against the hollow of skin where blood vessels swell.

How come the female does all the work? our daughter quips, eyeing the nest on our porch. Guarding
is work, her brother retorts. Would you rather sit on the eggs or fight off a hawk?

Three hatchlings nestle together, fuzzy and limp, not yet able to lift their heads. Mama adjusts
her cramped stance, positions her brood patch to warm the chicks without smothering them.

Kids home for summer, the house pulses with chatter and yawp. We stuff the fridge, throw
parties, listen for the click of the front door when they stay out late. The return to quiet is abrupt.

Sunup to sundown, both parents pick over patches of moss, dart to the nest, push grubs
and bugs down into narrow throats. Together they mob the hawk that whistles overhead.

We humans are all intrusion, chatting in rockers, watering plants. We try to scare off the hawk, play
owl calls from our phones. The robins flit up into the trees until the shared haven is theirs again.

As the babies grow, we can see their gaping beaks, their soft bodies lunging upward, angling to beat
their siblings to the next morsel. After a few days, we see only two beaks. The survivors

squawk and grow up fast, fill the nest that will soon hold nothing but pillows of down, nothing
but worry–when the phone rings at 3 am, when it doesn’t. I always keep the ringer on.

Even before her chicks fledge, I see Mama perched upright at the edge of the nest, puffed,
as if she now fills her own skin. As if her belly feathers will grow back the same.