• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Karen Sisk: For My Mother

March 30, 2013 by PBQ

Albatross mothers fly over water
for hard glints, food signals
to feed chicks flopping fuzzy,
thin-skinned on lava-black beaches.
They grab bottle caps, lighter fragments,
fork and comb tines to regurgitate
into gaping beaks, fill their chick’s loose
coin purse bellies that starve and burst.
Eyes shrivel to peppercorns.
Bodies, bone and feather shadows,
cracked open, spill out plastic,
piñatas filled with dollar store favors
smacked open and left rotting around
the mound of discarded party minutiae.

Filed Under: Contributors 86, Issue 86, Poetry, Poetry 86 Tagged With: Contributors 86, Karen Sisk, Poetry, Poetry 86

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ @ AWP!

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org