Laura Scott

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These Days

For days and days nothing happens, nothing ever happens unless you count the birds
that leap into her. Mostly it’s just bits, sometimes their feet – pronged tendons

perched on her collar bones, twitching like animated twigs when she moves –
sometimes the ruffling sound of the small ones, clotting the air with their wings

when they fly away from her in the garden. She thinks a whole one got in once –
a sleek fat crow pushed and pecked his way through the webbing of her ribs

with his wing hands and his sharp beak, and settled himself amongst the branches
of her lungs, caw-cawing to her for hours. And she liked that, really liked that,

the feeling of him being there. But he flew off, she knew he would. Mostly it’s their throats
that cling to her, their double-barrelled throats, pulsing and trilling and beating

like toy hearts strewn across her, somersaulting, practising, practising their song
in the neck of her woods until it flitted into her as easily as they did. Those little wrens,

nightingales, and thrushes thrown across the trees, a disbanded choir, forced out
of their hedge rows. Yes, it was their throats that clung to her, that cling to me –

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LAURA SCOTT’s first collection So Many Rooms was published by Carcanet in August 2019.