My Mother is an Extinct Bird
by Diana Odasso
My mother is an extinct bird
sketched in children’s books,
surviving in imaginations
grand and small.
The old mantelpiece man
narrates this flight of auburn fiction,
his pipe alit by the tale’s wind.
How can I follow her
when she is a vellum-bound kite,
tracing pinpoint crescents across the sky?
A Southward Tide 