A House of Rhymes and Paper Birds | E. E. Rhodes
Our mother lives in a house of birds. Free and flying, perched on every horizontal flat and ledge and shelf. We nest relentless, fledge and shit, make it into adulthood together or not, fuss at our feathers, preen and screech. There are blue and green and white eggs all over everywhere, in each size and shape of stretched all round.
Our father is a poet and spends long days in his writing room. His door is closed and his eyes shut, too. He says he writes one word every six days. And then erases one word each month. We tiptoe quietly if we’re within noise of him, so that he only knows if we’re here by feel.
Our mother buys bird seed by the double truckload, for all us birds inside and outwith our house. Alongside the living, breathing, dying little feathered fickle fleet wings she folds paper cranes to fill up every space.
Someone told her that if she made a thousand then there would be a falling peace. So she thought she owed the world to make a few more. Activism is some people’s rent, she tells us, for living on this planet. And her version of hope is to origami into shape even more futile fluttered birds.
She’s made maybe ten thousand and featured in the newspaper, and the blessing of that coverage is that she made a hundred fostered more. Our father uses them to light the fire and candles. The fluttered ash falls as soft as the feathers fluff downing.
Our mother buries crooning every bird that dies, paper or half real and all broken breathinged. She makes birds of all my father’s writings, and doesn't much care for the poetry that feeds us.
Neither believes now that the other can be saved.
Our father, the poet? Oh, he thinks he is a wildcat. Our many call-her-mother, the clutching bringer? She thinks she is a broody love-clucked sheltering hen. And we don’t tell them different, so in this broken-glass and brackle-bricked birdcage with all our un-fledging, can any of us say who is really to blame?
E. E. Rhodes is an archaeologist who accidentally lives in part of a small castle in Worcestershire in England. She writes flash, cnf, and prose poetry, to try and make sense of it all. She has work coming soon in Janus Literary, Fictive Dream, Versification, and Capsule Stories. She is a regular columnist for Spelt Magazine. Say hello on Twitter @electra_rhodes