The Parable of the Albatross

by Sonya Taaffe

When I breathe, you can hear its restless feathers,
the great-winged wanderer of the sea-lanes
locked inside my ribcage
like a word inside a speckled shell.
The skim of the ice-white waves of the Southern Ocean
and the shearing rise of the wind over seal-black rocks
and the distance, the silence
made the language I speak first
before my throat closed with birdsong
and the red-breasted herald of northern spring.
The thickets are full of small wings and sweet voices,
the nests with delicate eggs, dapple-dyed.
Only the stranger who can match me dancing
and meet me balanced on the endless arc of air
will hear the deeper breath I take, unfolding
the full span of my ambition,
holding steady between the sea and the stars.

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Sonya Taaffe's short fiction and poetry can be found in the collections Ghost Signs (Aqueduct Press), A Mayse-Bikhl (Papaveria Press), Postcards from the Province of Hyphens (Prime Books), and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books), and in various anthologies including The Humanity of Monsters, Genius Loci: Tales of the Spirit of Place, and Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror. She is currently senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons; she holds master's degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object. She lives in Somerville with her husband and two cats.

Photography: adapted from Northern Royal Albatross in flight at Taiaroa Head, Dunedin, New Zealand, by Benchill.