Eye of the Blackbird

Mary Ann McFadden

Winner of The Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry
selected by Chase Twichell

Excerpt from Eye of the Blackbird

The perfect day is like pain, years later, pain without the pain.

An old woman looks back on her childhood

and sees only gashes of light. She sees the stretched bags of milk

she never gave her children.

She sees fear warping and bending the bodies of everyone she loved.

She sees herself grown strange to herself, not crazed but shorn,

the nails torn, her crucifixion merely boring,

her tall children, arrows of arrows quivering in the world

like struck guitar strings.

On target, she knows, each heart the center of all things, each worm

turning in the apple at the center of the tree

falling with the apple to the ground, leaving its eggs, its silk,

its perfect day.