Our Mother is a Bird

She takes us flying.
Easter weekend, we wear matching outfits.
I drop my yellow sweater in the Potomac.
She leaves my sister in a cherry tree at the Tidal Basin.

Mother flies low so I can scoop up my sweater.
Two tourists rescue my sister from the crook of the cherry tree.
My sister is covered in blossoms.
She never forgives our bird.

We are grade schoolers.
Our mother is eight musical notes.
Not an ear worm exactly, more an anthem.
She unfurls each morning.

In our teens she is a book.
The cover is purple.
She stashes it out of sight.
For me to know and for you to find out.

I like her best as a bird.
She is not home. She is fast.
She is love
gone off course.

I am water gushing over her burial mound.
I haven’t been solid in weeks.
I swim in her rectangle until
my sister orders me to stop.

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Buffy Shutt, a former movie marketing executive, is a poet, mother, and grandmother. Her work appears in various journals. Buffy’s debut poetry collection, Recruit to Deny, is available now. She is also the author of Memos from the [20th] 21st Century, a chapbook of poems disguised as corporate memos, and of the chapbook animal magnetism. Buffy graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she met her best friend, her husband, and her writing self.