On the first day Paz hangs the bird feeder outside her new condo and fills it with seeds, then leaves to renew her library books. That night the largeness of the condo makes her hyperaware of everything. She can’t close her eyes without feeling the darkness balloon outwards, open and shadowy and alive. Goose feathers from the mattress prick and pull at her wrinkled skin, her joints ache with every movement, and windows rattle in the living room.
            She abandons sleep and turns on the lamp. Paz is reading a book about birds. The illustrations are attractive, ink and watercolor, but in many places the text is archaic. A chapter on pelicans describes how their beaks are short and sharp, and how a pelican’s blood will restore life to a brood killed by snakes or other birds. A few pages later, after the penguin and the pheasant, Paz comes to a chapter on the phoenix. She admires the detail of the illustrations, frowns as she reads. The phoenix builds a nest to prepare for its own death, then bears the pain of the fire, awaiting rebirth in the coming morning. Something about the nest—How does the bird know when to build?—keeps Paz puzzling over the page until she drifts off, book in lap.

On the second day Paz wakes to find the bird feeder on the ground. Someone or something has knocked off the cap and what little seeds are left have been scattered all over the deck. An omen, she thinks. Or squirrels.
            She researches how to squirrel-proof a feeder. One promising solution requires plumbing pipe. Now is the time to evaluate how hard she’s willing to work for her bird feeder. But the deck in her fantasy has birds hopping everywhere, gorged on sunflower seeds, and she’s determined to write poetry about them. Poetry seems a fitting form for the finches she envisions: chickadees, cardinals, and warblers, plump like pears.
            Birds can mean all sorts of things, like freedom or beauty or grief. She will resist these symbols until there is hardly any trace of memoir or tell-all in the poetry—this is her second fantasy. Only one of the birds will represent her sister Lourdes, but it will be the softest symbol in the saddest poem and will be justified by the number of times Lourdes’ grandchildren will read it, cry, and read it again, over and over. Paz likes to imagine people crying while they read her writing. This isn’t cruel.

Paz isn’t a cruel person. That’s why she spends the third day preparing PVC for the feeder. She lights a stick of incense on the deck and measures piping. According to the web tutorial, squirrels will slip off the sleek plastic of the PVC when they try to climb it. After the work is done she rests along the back wall of the deck, breathing in a cloud of myrrh, and invents a narrative about an old man who swallows a bird. In her mind this will happen by accident. The bird will fly too low to the ground, the man will cross its path, take a breath, and, following a choking of wings and a pained cry, the bird will disappear into his stomach. Afterwards the man will discover feathers growing from his shoulder blades, his eyes turning glassy and alert. Paz repeats the story again and again in her head; she only needs to study birds a little more carefully in order to write the story as a poem.

On the morning of the fourth day there are no birds. Seeds are scattered everywhere again, and the PVC pole has melted overnight, molten plastic pooled and hardened onto the deck. Paz rubs her toes over scorch marks on the boards. She picks up the singed feeder. Not squirrels, she thinks. Maybe teenagers, an echo of how she and Lourdes, over sixty years ago, used to stuff wet leaves and mud into the mailboxes of brownstones on the way to school. It was their morning ritual: Paz darting from door to door, keeping low beneath her bookbag, and Lourdes staring up at the houses with a steady glare like she was waiting for the owners to come watch her from their windows.
            Memories like these occasionally paralyze Paz. The gardens they ruined. The boys they locked in a hearse overnight. Smaller things, separate from the fun, like fighting with their mother, the long months without speaking to each other. But Paz and her sister never risked setting houses on fire. Fires turn lives upside down. Paz has every right to be afraid and angry, or at least to call the police and inform them of a crime. She sits down in her armchair and, instead of reaching for the phone, picks up the book of birds. The vandals have deprived her of a day’s research on the deck.
            She opens at a bookmark left in the phoenix chapter. Illustrations depict a bird with brilliant red wings and a multicolored tail being consumed by yellow flames. She concentrates on the drawings and wonders if a bird like the phoenix could exist, and if it did, whether it would eat sunflower seeds. Later that night while stirring cardamom in with the green beans, Paz goes so far as to imagine how such a bird might fit into her poetry collection. She stirs and composes: Eyes like sunbugs / flash omen red / a warning to the robins / this viejita only wants to write / sad poems about you.

In light of the bird feeder’s fiery end, Paz spends the fifth day at the park. The birds there keep to the tops of trees and the fringe of the lawn unless she stays very still. She freezes whenever a sparrow or pigeon comes close; she’s interested in how they move, the interlacing feathers, the way they rotate their wings. When they fly, their whole bodies change. Suddenly they are whirling sheets of paper carried by the wind, or mere specks, bullets in the air. A finch flies close to the ground and Paz pays close attention to its flight, how it dips and flits and shoots up into the trees again.
            She tries to write her poem about the man who becomes a bird, but she doesn’t get more than a few lines down. The birds seem distant from the page; she can’t find the right words to describe them. And a finch is too small and insignificant—an eagle or a heron could fill a body. Maybe the man is wrong, too. For a moment the sun is directly above her in the sky, a signal for her to return home. The heat of the day rises with her from the bench. Maybe she’ll put her whole self in the poem. It will be the centerpiece of the collection. Everything must be exactly right, especially the bird feeder.
            The solution, she decides, is to hold a stakeout. In order to lure the vandal, she must first show that she wants something to come. She pours seeds in a bowl to leave on the railing. Then she constructs a makeshift hunting blind against the far corner of the deck and climbs behind this wall of foliage—branches she brought back from the park. There in the shadows, she will take the vandal by surprise.
            She sits for hours. This is a poem of its own: the afternoon turning to evening and sunbeams bending under a darker sky. The air falls still and dry, the breeze dies, and a cinnamon smell descends like a fog over Paz. The source is unclear. She thinks at first that somebody in the house is burning her incense. But no, the smell comes from the branches. These limbs must be from a cinnamon tree, thin and bare with smooth bark. Their perfume settles heavily, and it’s so rich that she begins to feel dizzy, along with a gradual burning in her stomach and shoulder blades. Something is prickling her skin, a sensation that dulls into numbness. The heat grows and grows. Paz can’t move her arms or legs. They are too light, as if her bones are hollow; she’s certain they’ll float away. And it has nothing to do with choking on wings. There’s no sharp pain in the stomach or chest. The branches simply catch fire, sheets of cinnamon flame that engulf Paz and her bristling feathers.
            Then it was me all along, she thinks. Or not. I don’t think I mind, I’m here now.
            She’s understanding something Lourdes must have known even as a kid: that every life has a definite, knowable path. Maybe Lourdes learned it while looking up at the windows of the houses, waiting for eyes to meet her in mutual realization. A self-fulfilling prophecy. It burns through Paz in a blaze of simultaneity—the end and beginning of another cycle. A golden breath fills her chest and sails back out. Her eyelids shut, struggle open, shut again and stay closed.

The fire that night, confined only to Paz’s deck, will burn until the morning of the sixth day. Dawn will arrive on a cloud of warm spices. And as the embers fade to charcoal, birds will begin to congregate. Cardinals, warblers, chickadees, finches, waxwings, magpies, wrens, canaries, and thrushes will peck at the roasted seeds on the railing, and three finches will venture as far as the mound of ash in the corner of the deck.
            The mound will shift and send the finches flapping back to the railing. A small head will lift from the ash, shivering, glaring, and featherless, red like a sore. It will open and close its curved yellow beak as if to speak. In only a few hours, this bird will grow to the size of an eagle with a bright, plumed head and a swan’s neck. Its tail, long and red with indigo and emerald streaks, will flare as it spreads its wings and climbs into the sky, trailing birdsong far above the morning.

On fishing

Packing nets and cargo
I sail the halibut sea
mast tilling the sky

On storms

Rain from the yellow clouds
waves rise in thrills
peaks unstilled

I dip, I sway, I say
if storms reveal a need
to see the white world break

then sit in the spray
the mad sea wind
and feel its color

On night

I lie in the shallows
like one in a cage
oily, little made of me

I’ll come ashore
and spill oranges
in the kerosene night

On light

Little moon, my daughter
a lantern, or persimmon
hung over the wharf

Pack smart. Pack peanut butter and your favorite four-fruits jelly. You can steal bread from the Jewel-Osco. Pack every journal you filled with poems and doodles and unsent letters. The ratty green journal has a sketch of a bottomless pit. You marked it with anatomic arrows pointing to the ground, the mouth, the slope, the pit.

Leave home. If Mom asks how long you’ll be gone, shrug and say you’re sorry. You might be gone years. Dad can’t sleep whenever you’re out past midnight, so he’ll be cracking wishbones, pacing back and forth behind the screen door.

Take the 1994 Camry and drive until it needs gas. The outbound express will be slow with traffic, but stay off the side roads. You’ll need as much open sky as possible. The search for pits is intuitive, the kind of rock-lifting you loved when you were a kid, fishing for beach glass on the junk-choked Lake Michigan shores. Once you get out of the suburbs, park on the shoulder and take a walk. Here you’ll notice the restless earth and leaves growing on the undersides of branches. If the signs aren’t there, keep driving. Don’t drive at night. 

Stretch your legs. The search for pits will take you from the plains of Illinois to the deserts of Nevada—flat places with big skies. For a while, it will seem like the pits are teasing you. You’ll arrive in a town and talk with locals. They’ll say, "Yeah, the pit closed up yesterday, you missed it.”

Get faster. Get better. Predict the tides, the rain, the small tremors. Become a living almanac.  That storm system is only backwash from El Niño. Follow the migrating pronghorns instead. Sneak into mines and quarries when you can. Memorize the scents of minerals. You will learn to hate staying in one state for more than a year.

Do anything not to be lonely.

Smile at everybody who stares too long. Gossip with gas station clerks. At motels, invite strangers to your room. Some will say they only want to talk, and you’ll listen until they say all they can. After they leave, write down everything they told you. Take note of their voices, the words they used, their faces when they spoke. For the ones who didn’t want to talk, sketch them from memory. Name them if you want. Nobody will keep in touch.

Your first pit will open up in the Badlands, and you might be there waiting. It will be the size of a large pond. A breeze will come hushing across the flats, and the pit will make sounds like a sleeping cat, soft and secretive. You won’t know what it is, but the inside will be black like clotted blood, and you’ll think you can see the spinning headlights of cars still falling far below.

If you miscalculated the distance, hike an hour from camp to reach it. You will find a woman standing on the rim. She will be older than you and taller—skinny like a cornstalk­­—with her truck parked on the other side of the pit.

She’ll go into her truck and bring out a hamper stuffed with letters and photos and books. They remind you of yours—of the fragments of people and places you collected on your own search. But as she tosses each item into the pit one by one, then hands some over for you to toss, too, she’ll tell you she came here with a plan. This is the biggest difference between the two of you. She’ll say feeding a pit is a way to soothe its anger. When a pit is calm and quiet and stupid, she'll tell you, that is the time to jump in.

Help her tie a rope from her waist to her truck. Step back. She’ll leap over the edge like a kid at the pool—arms flung out and wild legs still running. The truck won’t budge as the rope slaps taut. Fix your eyes on the rope. It will start thrashing. Fight the urge to look inside the pit.

The rope will slacken and go still. You will wonder if the pit swallowed her. Don’t look. Wait for her to climb back up dragging the pit out of the ground and keep your eyes down as she trusses it up like a dead whale. You’ve never seen a pit out of the ground before. Feel sick when you catch a glimpse of her looping the rope around this huge mound of empty.

Why don’t you stick around? she’ll ask, tightening knots. Lie. Give her some bullshit about someone—a girlfriend, a boyfriend—waiting for you back home. Truthfully, staying will hurt your heart too much. Your legs will be weak, and your heart will hurt for the pit and for the miles you walked to find it.

You’ll find the same woman at every pit after that. Her truck is the harshest shade of orange you'll ever see. At the fifth pit, in Idaho, you’ll arrive and only the truck will be there, radio turned all the way up. The rope will be dancing over the edge, and you’ll know she’s working on the other end.

If you want to look—if your curiosity is too strong—then look. Poke your head past the rim and squint. At first it’ll be impossible to see anything at all. Squint harder. Lean closer. Your eyes will adjust and follow the rope down to her tall, swinging shape. 

She’ll be tearing at the skin of the pit with her bare hands. She’ll take out chunks with her teeth. The stuff she rips out—pieces of the pit wall—won’t fall like the books do. They are made of something that will bunch and choke and kill the pit until she’s ready to drag its body out of the ground.

When you realize this, back up fast. You’ll find a knife in the bed of the truck and slice through the rope. You want only to stop her. There are other ways to do this, but in the moment, too much thinking will make you dizzy. The knife will do its job. The severed line will race across the grass and vanish over the edge of the pit.

There will be a sharp gasp for air. Ignore it. Stumble over your heels and away from the truck, the pit, the radio still going. The pit will close up after you’ve crossed the horizon.

Get back to Illinois. This is how you keep going. You’ll find the pits easily now that you’ve seen a few die. They’ll pop up under your shoes every place you stop to rest. This will seem backwards, somehow, but drive steady. Pick a highway town like Monmouth or Dover to park the Camry. Stay indoors and watch the windows. Wait for the pits to find you.

Signs will hit all at once, storms dropping out of the sky, leaves and cobs flying off their stalks. And the pits will shake the town when they arrive. These will be your pits, the ones crawling and crowding along the stretch of road. They’ll feel your spirit cleaving through the dirt like an ocean current, the strength of it herding them. They’ll feed on it. Feel their spirits lash out when you leave in the night to walk the highway. They’ll claw through your shoes and cling like hooks into your heels. Let them draw you close. 

Bring your journals. Walk out to the highway and kneel in the rubble of the road. You’ll count four big pits and a dozen smaller ones clustered around. You might be scared, too. You’ve been living in the clenched mouth of your own fear ever since you left home. Roll that terror around with your tongue, then open a journal and read aloud the story you heard from a boy in Galena. He had a brother who died from a heart defect. He said, "We didn’t know what was wrong. It was something the doctors didn’t see." Telling this, he had his hand over his own heart.

Fold up his story and stretch your arm out with it over the nearest pit. Dip and swirl it in the darkness. Drop the paper. The pit will make a sound like breathing.

Read the story from a woman in Lansing who opened a bar. A girl in Spring Hill with a gold tooth. The drawing of a man from Booneville standing in the doorway, stuck between going and staying. Drop them all and feel the pit smooth out below you like an unwrinkled brow.

Drop pages of journals. Drop sketches. Drop letters and books. Drop lockets and burner phones. Drop wishbones and beach glass and pb&j sandwiches. Maybe, in the hours before dawn, you’ll want to collapse from exhaustion. Fight the urge. Dig into your bag. Find the knife you stole from the orange truck. Drop that last; it will spin on the way down.

The terror will ebb. The night will pale and wane. The pits will close by morning.

the fly is an old grandmother
settled down on my laptop screen

lulled by the electric heaven
she ignores all shadows beyond it

salmon-scent from the sink
black dog pawing on glass door

unwelcome reach of my hand
collapsing screen into keyboard

hum of two ceiling fans
cutting through a soft dark heat