Dirt smears the wrinkled cheeks of a Mothered woman. 
Sweat or infant’s piss drips from her brow 
as she steps off her stoop, arms full of 
a once-black blanket brown with dog hair and bleach. 
She gathers the corners and shakes, hard, once, twice; 
the third shows vigor of red lips no longer seen 
in the mirror. A fourth, and it hits the ground 
with a force that would knock a bird unconscious. 
A flock of starlings erupts from the fallen fabric: 
every shed hair becoming a feathered fiend 
that takes to the sky in place of one who longs to follow. 
Fiend, not friend, for they shall never return dark talons 
to any brick step like the one upon which she deflates. 
She watches until the hundreds murmur to a small period 
and disappear over the horizon, only to descend 
where she does not know, to feed on a flattened luna moth 
midnight-dead in hope of a speeding Ford’s headlight dream.