The Chair & The Birdcage, and: Confessional Corey Van Landingham (bio) The Chair & The Birdcage No one has come to see them, and no one will. We belong together their morning refrain. In the early light the Chair and Birdcage debate the pastoral. Its over-arching despair. All those damn bleating sheep. The exogenous shepherd and his devilish superstitions. The split-open head of the cow. Irreverent, elegant flying formations of some dark, too-large birds. Here the Cage weeps, not for the Chair whose leg is now perpetually half-breaking, but for itself. For what it has lost. The Chair insists the shepherd is wise and noble. Because it would like to be knocked around, a little more touching. The Chair insists the sheep want the cane, the shears. And they are facing each other, the Chair, the Birdcage, they can see that this means everything. And they are trying to reason, they are the last two left. They will start a new life together. It will be sweet, it will exist under a constant, dizzy, sugar-spell of rain. There will be baths with dried flowers poured into the water. There will be swooning and warm milk and a small porch to watch the weather. Chair says: Turn around. Chair says: Turn around and shut up. Cage obeys— this must be what love is like. The Birdcage swivels its hips to the field below and sees all the animals it never got to hold. How absolute it seems, [End Page 69] the distance. Tie up your hair. The horses that must have once been wild. Close your eyes. The lightning-blackened branches. The stranger it will never touch. Close your eyes. The long unbraiding of the far-below river the river the river and the shepherd with his face hidden as he bends to drink. [End Page 70] Confessional Once my father lit our house on fire. I drove my mother to the hospital, kissed the shape of the doorknob on her palm, and, when the burn changed to bandage, killed the waiting room lights. I saw what turns on after it’s turned off. All the old women’s shrieks were just birds trying out other tongues. I loved to roll heroic names inside my mouth in the new dark. Back home, I made a nest of cigarette cartons and fake opal jewelry sent from Hawaii after the death of my Great Aunt. They hatched barbed wire—I kept it to myself. I buried it under the cherry blossom tree to guard all my dead pets. This was before I held the lighter to my skin in the co-ed bathroom, before the drugs were no longer fun, before my mother, the scientist, told me how she used to pull the wings from [End Page 71] Japanese beetles to make them her own, little buttons, dark thumbs she could carry with her. When men tell me what to call my body, I cannot help but think transubstantiation. How what one shoves under the microscope will be named harmful or benign. Once, my father’s death was an excuse to stop eating. My mother’s father was an x-ray man, once a man of flash and bone. Though I never met him, he tells me nightly that a demon is an inverted god. Once, there were two young pigeons in a cage, whom I mistook for sparrows. Last night a cricket jumped inside my mouth, replacing the voice I spent so long trying to ignite. Now all my heroes are beginning to revolt me. I choke on every creation myth. My name was never in any bible. [End Page 72] Corey Van Landingham Corey Van Landingham is currently an MFA candidate at Purdue University, where she serves as Poetry Editor of Sycamore Review. Her poems are forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Devil’s Lake, Indiana Review, Redivider, Third Coast, Typo, Washington Square Review, West Branch and ZYZZYVA. Copyright © 2012 University of Wisconsin Board of Regents
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