UnEarth Magazine.

Words by Jennifer Greene, Art by Julia St. John

On the line distinguishing above and below,
the bird in flight observes the everlasting
feud of the Sky and the Earth. The world
turns harpsichordial in autumn, trees
like serpents shedding their skin. Spools
of cylindrical chimneys spouting smoke
in puffs warming the bird’s underbelly. 
On his wings are the clouds, the Sky is
an opaque barrel of marbles and pearls
around his dizzied feathered head. 
The Sky rolls and gleams, then darkens and
churns like an angry organ full of vomitspit. 
Makes its bagpipe thunder, seared with man’s
fumes as thick as the Blood of the Lamb. 

Heavier still.
Shedding, igniting, crisping. 
The spinning globe transforms by the batting wing. 
Warming, as certainly as all birds and treeleaves will slowly
descend. Unnaturally natural. Breathless Earth
breathes nothing into the Sky, the heavier lid
capping the vast landfill. The bird is delirious when

the crooked line between Earth-Sky is obscured by the smoke. 

Directionless with a devastated compass, 
pollution veils the constellations. 
The bird is cursed to fly in wicked circles,
turning the infinite bend towards an equinox
that will never come. Never landing tired feet
on the cradle of the ground too burnt to behold.
The bird ceases to distinguish up from down,
lost in the grey rug of liminality. 
His egg of the world with its yolk sun and
fertile white Sky collapsed, kicking its
brokenshell cinders like lost leaves,
flying away from and into nothing.