The Vulture - Mo Gardner
This is her favorite stretch of the road,
bountiful, plentiful,
always calling to her.
The sudden bend will sometimes
catch things by surprise—
wheels will screech
but drive on after some hesitation,
leaving animals flayed,
splattered,
torn open
on the asphalt.
She smells death in the air.
Hungry, she descends
and picks at their stringy bits of meat,
sunbaked and rotting.
Greedily, she cleans them,
nibbles at the undercarriage
of their carcasses,
picking flesh from bone.
An egg grows inside her,
hard and solid as a stone.
She carries it with her.
At the coyote, she stops and stares at its remaining eye,
open, black as ink, drowning light
in its sightless depths,
half-lidded as if dreaming.
She stares, but there is nothing to grieve—
no hesitation in her picking,
no pang of recognition in her feathered breast
that she, too, is a body on this earth.
The carrion works down her throat.
In a season, she will store some in her crop
to feed her chick when it hatches.
She knows death intimately. She can smell a body failing from miles away—
a mixture of chemicals in the system,
a specific odor in the air,
the process as mundane as a math equation.
A body is only a body,
just shattered jaws and thin ropes of muscle,
blurring together in a mosaic,
and each one always smaller than what it had been in life.
Death is what keeps her going,
what will call to her, again and again, until she’s netted in its arms.
And then she, too, will feed the earth,
her imperious wings meekly folded—
a body in the soft grass,
perhaps carrion to another—
a puzzle piece falling into place.
Mo Gardner is a graduating English major at UAlbany with a minor in Creative Writing. He can recite the alphabet backwards.