1
An albatross spends six years flying over the ocean, then lands to mate. She, too, slept in flight and flew through sleep, eels coiling below her, dreams batting her wings, phosphenes a backstory of china-blue broken hearts, islands lost to the surge of sea from a mainland where her sex broods for her return.
2
How fragile the land. Easter promised fin turned feather, drowning turned cloud-wish. How much faster a body moves through air while water and land, heavy with regret and atonement, buries all we thought we could be.
3
If I were an albatross, I would sing to you that there is nothing to fear. I would carry flowers from my father’s grave to you, would unfold my body for you, land on the hot earth as all mortals do. But I would still dream of flight. I would carry it with me like a sunken treasure, like a sun bursting with its setting into you.
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Kika Dorsey is an author with a PhD in Comparative Literature. Her books include the poetry collections Beside Herself, Rust, Coming Up for Air, and Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger, which won the Colorado Authors’ League, and the novel As Joan Approaches Infinity. Her forthcoming collection of poetry, Good Ash, will be released in December 2024. She is a lecturer at the University of Colorado.
© 2024, Kika Dorsey
Halfway Down the Stairs 