Elaine Fowler Palencia

Elaine Fowler Palencia, Champaign IL, has published four poetry chapbooks; two short story collections; a short monograph, The Literary Heritage of Hindman Settlement School; and On Rising Ground, a work of Civil War history based on the letters of her great-great grandfather. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have received eight Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the book review editor of Pegasus, journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and a member of the Women in Appalachia Project.

If Birds Were Like People

Some would zoom up to the bird feeder
in their little bird cars and rev the engines
in the drive-through and play loud bird music
until one of them would refuse to pay,
instead spitting seeds back
at the mild-mannered robin taking orders,
or, two of them would take offense
at the cut of a wing or feather color
and jump out of their little bird cars
and face off, flexing their claws and crowing smack

But also, if birds were like people, eventually
a flock would huddle on a pine branch
and decide to establish a bird pantry,
say, an aluminum pie tin from a dumpster
they could wedge in a tree crotch
and fill with worms for old birds too weak to pull
a worm out of the ground, and for bird mothers
having to raise fledglings in a worm desert

Despite, of course, the number of furious fowl
who caw that hungry birds should quit being slackers
and go find some roadkill
even if there are no roads
and they are too old or sick to fly far,
rather than depend on stupid kindness,
until the charitable birds would coo and convene
a parliament of fowls to discuss the matter
and maybe that’s why we sometimes wake
to a cacophony of bird shrieks at dawn
and avian clouds swirling like black pepper
as they pursue some high birdly purpose
their ancestors the dinosaurs ignored, and which
could well save us all.

Plaza de Toros

Each year, since he sent his sons to school in the States,
he has bought extra tickets for the bullfights,
knowing they will arrive for the holidays
with long-legged gringas on their arms.
Watching them show the girls how macho they are
when a matador their age is gored in the thigh,
he knows he has loved them too well
and that the story of his life is just that,
a story to tell these chicas, a suit of lights
his boys can wear out to dinner:

Standing in tall cane, paying cash
to his machete-bearing workers each week
with two soldiers to back him up;
arriving an hour early to a political meeting
to unlock a bathroom window, so that later
by going to piss he can escape assassination;
refusing to stop on a mountain highway at night
to tend to a body in the road because he knows
the corpse is a trap set by bandits;
being twenty-two and sitting in the dust
of a run-down plaza de toros in Pueblo Nuevo
listening to a priest perform the last rites over him
as he holds in his intestines with his hands

Now, in these sunbaked stands,
he catches the cool eyes of other men
who live as he does, bathed in the wind of death.
They look at his sons, at the gringuitas
who hide their eyes against the shoulders of his boys
when the bull tosses the next matador high
and gores him where he falls.
He knows the men love their sons as he loves his,
and that it is this love that assures
the sons will never rise at dawn as he does each day
to watch the great white statue of Cristo Rey
that stands above the city with outstretched arms
rise flapping into the sky,
leaving the newborn day to fend for itself.