TODAY AT LUNCH

Birdies, exclaims my daughter, birdies
and rushes to the rooftop’s edge.

I rush toward her life and do what I always do:
hook my hand into the seam of her hoodie.

It’s not that I want to deprive her of freedom.
I want to deprive her of pain, of injury.

I want to deprive me of pain, of injury, of loss.
When she was born, I understood what fear was.

Birdies, exclaims my daughter, birdies.
Her little spine strains away from my grip.

I do what I always do in tense, teachable moments.
They have wings, I say, but we don’t. But we can pretend,

I say and swoop her into my arms. I bop her up, down
and tell her this is the only safe way to fly, for her, for us.

But birdies, hungry birdies, she shrieks. There’s the crux
of it: I thought she was leaping toward danger.

She just wanted to feed a stranger. No problem,
I say, snuggling her into my chest. We can share.

I root down and beg her wiggly body to stay planted,
snatch a picnic curly fry and hold it over the ledge.

Lunch for the birdies. Here, come here to us, we shout
and wait for a winged miracle to notice.

Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has won the DIAJ Award and been nominated repeatedly for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have recently appeared in The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Burningword, Coachella Review, Gyroscope Review, Bicoastal Review, The Braided Way, Stonecoast Review, and Sunlight Press. Alina is a haphazard but passionate gardener and a disability advocate. Today she really, really misses her husband.