Aviary

by Yong-Yu Huang

Winner, Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, selected by Kevin Latimer / for my Grandfather

Lately, the swallows slouching north, too quiet
                                to be any kind of pilgrimage. Pressed my ear
             to your crooked spine & listened
                                            for flight, barely enough
                          to drink from.          The bones you could disown
& still remain.                    When the time came,

             I found a tunnel of birds in your throat,
pulsing light. Still, I pretended the shadow behind us
                         was only thunder—  
                                                        that slow stretch
               of sound, unending.

Grandfather, remember how we stood
                                in an smog of wings, the body caught
             between everything we couldn’t carry
                                             home. That night, I woke to find you

                   swallowing a menagerie
of loss, dust-bound heat,                          tender as the sickness 
             that crept across the clearing,
                                an orbit that burrowed sunspots

             into the skin. I confess—I clipped boughs
                                       from the trees before I learned of winter & its
burdened back.
                                Every star I mistook
              on the horizon for a bird’s eye,       
                                             white streaking the flesh

              faster than I could catch. Grandfather,
I am learning to thaw sickness
                   from the mouth, to barter the sky

for a canyon of light. To excise contagion
                           & bury as myth.        I’m told that
              the body is always pilling itself 
                                       into smaller stories—

                         dust to dust. The years burnt as offering. 
Forgive me, how I remembered                          
only after the birds in the dark.

Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese student living in Malaysia. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Waxwing, Frontier Poetry, and Cheap Pop Lit, among others, and has been recognised by Princeton University, The Kenyon Review, and the Poetry Society of the UK. In her free time, she enjoys listening to Studio Ghibli soundtracks and sitting on the beach.