Second Wing | Self-Portrait as Self-Portrait

Tyler Wagner

Tyler Wagner holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington in Seattle. Follow him @Tyler_J_Wagner.

Second Wing

It took all day to recover

the wing. Silt 

glittering under his finger

-nails / nails had buried it, 

shared rust next to the brushed 

stream, which seemed to flow 

from nowhere / nowhere, the source 

of the wing, he imagined. A cello 

string strung between the wing’s coverts, 

plumage piecemeal torn, half-

wing / half-wing, he thought. 

The first wing he found 

wasn’t a wing at all. It was 

a shrunken lung 

punctured by a sharp tooth. 

He polished it until it fluttered 

/ it fluttered and fit in his mouth 

like a radiating fish. It had no 

taste / no taste tasted like the lung. 

It tasted like a glistening, archaic 

bow, didn’t it? / It didn’t belong

to him, but he’d found and kept

already a tongue / a tongue slack

and stuck to the side of a barrel 

stuffed with ersatz lashes. Was it

a wing, too? He wished 

this wing wouldn’t lift

from the silt / silt, the stream 

stilting around the wing. 

He wished it were whole.

Self-Portrait as Self-Portrait

Some days I feel more like a sketch of a body than a body, or

a weathered crow

bursting [          ] from the throat of another

crow. Thrown toward a factorial of meadow, seed-roiled sidewalk,

cabals of blinks

wrinkled into boughs. [          ] to multiply.

Some days the river birches smirk at me. Always wearing their best [          ].

We have a joke:

I speak to them like Jimmy Stewart might,

like each syllable is half jaw, half air. I [          ] you have to be there.

The birches aren’t.

There, I mean. They’re Wanted posters for lost

[          ] posted on lonely phone poles. The police sketch doesn’t even look

like them. Some days

I em dash [          ]. Omission the meadow.

I flatline in the penumbral subjunctive, a diadem of wings

adorning [          ].

Some days I hide in Jimmy Stewart’s throat,

worried the math won’t work. The shading isn’t [          ]. I bring the outside

in and then can’t

reverse course. Can’t autocorrect, return:

I circle myself in search of a tail to chase. Weathering the [          ]

or besmirching

the factory of crows above the red

birches, water birches? Some days [          ] fills my throat, and I try not to

look in his eyes.

By the time I reach myself, I’m gone.

Issue 10.2