Egret
The woman felt cooped up—stuck in a reality she created yet no longer wanted. Stuck between the walls of buildings like a critter seeking the field. She wanted to run through the wilds. She craved the kind of places that required engines to get to—engines like the ones she fell asleep to when she was little but now, without a driver, there seemed to be too many stop signs and yellow lights. Where could the woman be free? Freedom being a false concept to begin with, a concept built on the unachievable, contingent on the torture you’re willing to endure first. Contingent on how you’ll be when you get there—how willing you are to pay taxes on the house you built out of the trees you cut praying to the gods and goddesses as you slice through. Taxes that don’t go into planting more trees but instead pay for the fumes that kill them without prayer or reverence. The woman breathed deep, letting the contaminants of her walls circle around inside of her and come out like fire. She did this every day but on this day she could feel the flames. Feel the particles that created her anger, feel the holes in her cabinets where the critters lie, feel the poison she put there to stop them, feel the chards of steel wool, the empty words people kept feeding her but mostly she could feel all her unattainable desires as they unraveled leaving bruises on her hips and splinters in her fingers.
She remembered a time when she used to think about the purifying qualities of vast cerulean oceans—places where listlessness ran silent and the Jacaranda grew from the cracks of coral reefs. A time when she thought about the anomalous undercurrent of natures force swooshing through shelled dwellings causing a city like transience . A time when one life washed in while another washed out—in and out, in and out—cyclical, fast, forcibly clean. A time when she thought about the life and death of things, the impermanence, the ungraspable and irreconcilable. There can be life in the same place there is death, on the same ground, touching the same arm, chair or wall, eating off the same table—but in one fowl swoop, one inescapable wave the fork falls to the floor and the spine relinquishes all responsibility letting a head fall to a plate. It’s unnerving to consider and this is why so many people seek out aggressive linearity she thought. Like tight rope walkers they know that the second they veer from the plan there is open air—if the net is there they bounce back up, climb the latter and get on the rope again but if the net isn’t they are left to walk on the ground or not at all. It’s the ground walking we are scared of the woman thought—the broken ladder—the being unable to inhabit the skies when war breaks out over land and ownership. When people get enslaved on the same dirt they move against, pray for and sleep within there is no where to go but up or in.
Her mind was relentless now. We live in a place where there are boundaries of all kinds simultaneously knowing of boundlessness and it is this knowledge that makes everything we exist within irrational. There is nothing rational about concepts built on irrational behaviors. We are where we start from she thought. The woman is the womb and the wombs carrier. The womb and the wombs carrier are the vast cerulean oceans and the uninhabitable skies. When she decided to stop staring, to stand up and move—everything she realized here would be gone. That is how her brain worked—things were there and then they weren’t. She was there and then she wasn’t. He was there and then he wasn’t. They were there and then they weren’t. It was there and then it wasn’t. This is the simplest thing in the world to know yet everything is based on staying. Why do humans want both the roots of the tree and the rootlessness of the fish and the birds? Why do they want to ground themselves, to take flight and to swim? Maybe it is this want that stops them from walking, this need for all things that keeps them missing the joy and fullness of one. As the woman perused her insides, scraping at the walls trying to understand the specs, she knew nothing was as she thought it was. Not even herself. What could a she be? Does she represent the ground, the ocean, the sky? Does she Represent the inner workings of a mind in heat? Does she represent hot, bothered and full of life? Does she represent birth—the birth of a human, the birth of an idea, the birth of hundreds of ideas? Does she represent a life long pregnancy constantly waddling through the world in desperate need of feeding her insides? Does she represent the stories of the women who came before her?
Does she represent the goddess who cries on the inside while no one is watching? Cries because she’s fully aware of the system she’s working against, fully aware of the war to come, knowing of death. Does she represent the goddesses arms—the way they fell dead while she slept. The way she flailed the middle of her body around to get them to move, fearful they’d snap if she went the wrong way. The way she watched her arms bend without permission. The way she waved her limp arms like a dying birds wings until she could feel them coming alive again, until she had control over every feather—lifting them the way she wanted them to lift, turning them the way she wanted them to turn. The way the wind stopped and the feathers morphed into arms again and suddenly she remembered she was a woman not a bird. The way she bit her finger to see if it hurt and wiped saliva on the flesh around her nipples.
Does she represent the kind of woman who came back from undiscussed travels in long white dresses with dirt along the edges as if she’d been running from something and never stopped. The kind of woman who walked into the house, usually after dark, and took off her clothes on the way to the bathroom—leaving a trail not to be followed while she sat in the tub for hours staring at the books she left behind—reading the words over and over until finally she fell asleep on them.
Does she represent a little girl who wore ugly cotton underwear and dressed in oversized sweatsuits. A little girl who braided her hair tight and long and meticulously tucked it inside her clothes. A little girl who got in bed with her mother as they cried and bled letting the pain and blood of their abuse magnetize and collect as one. A little girl who decided to get up when all the tears and blood were gone and go to school. A little girl who used to smile at a little boy in art class—secretly painting their imagined love in the form of suns and moons but now painted old, fat men with snakes between their legs and knives as fingers. Painted police badges ex’d out in blood, broken crystal glasses and fallen Malta. Painted torn silk billowing in the wind of a dragons breath and a lady whose clothes were torn by the claws of another.
Maybe she represented all of this beauty and this pain. Maybe she was yelling so loud trying to tell these stories and no one could hear her. Maybe there was no one to share she with, nowhere to put the pain as it rose except those uncontaminated trees the woman couldn’t get to without all those engines. She wanted to be dropped in the middle of the ocean where the fear of the unknown, the pondering of death was all that existed between that sky and that water. She wanted to float there looking at the open space, feeling the weight of worlds below her knowing she would eventually sink in or be taken down unwillingly but it would be okay because it would make sense. There would be prayer and reverence, there would be unfettered, limitless space—no walls, no poison, no taxes, no fumes—just life, death, sky and water. The sound of seas slapping against seas, the smell of salted ocean breeze and the animals who live there—swimming in and out of the deep somehow understanding that there is nothing more than nourishment and part of accepting that is accepting death at any time accepting its relevance and its reality accepting that in order for she to live she must die and there is nothing more boundless than that.
Transmissions Circa 2019
Birds-Eye-View Spotlight Writer
GOODW.Y.N— To read a recent interview about her work CLICK HERE
If you want more from The Birds — Check out Nicole Goodwin or GOODW.Y.N. Nicole is the 2013-2014 Queer Art Mentorship Queer Art Literary Fellow, as well as the winner of The Fresh Fruit Festival's 2013 Award for Performance Poetry. She is also the finalist for the Poet House 2013 Poet House Emerging Poets Fellowship Program. Recently, she published the articles "Talking with My Daughter..." and "Why is this Happening in Your Life..." (Personal essay/Review for award-winning documentary Tough Love) in the New York Times' parentblog Motherlode. Additionally, her work '"Desert Flowers" was shortlisted and selected for performance by the Women's Playwriting International Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.
