A Woman in a Bird Mask, NYC, 1967

If the only thing people saw when they looked at me
was half a blackbird, its beak forever closed,
feathers framing my face in winged-parentheses,
I could navigate this world without the past imposed
on me. At the Purim Ball, everywhere my mother’s 
face behind a mask, and in those eyes, the nightmare 
of life gone up in smoke. She learned to hover
above herself, turn away from the door of despair
her parents were forced to open: Jews Invited.
Mother and her black-boot phobia, the stare
of strangers on the subway. With Ethel indicted,
she thought it was a matter of time before they came
to round us up like cattle and pack us into trains.
She always said Greenglass put the blame
on his sister to save himself. Those stains
he’ll never wash clean. And she was right
about most things, her intuition my heirloom.
The bird’s eyes are tiny onyx spheres, its flight
or dreams of flight filed in a long-forgotten room.  

VANESSA HALEY

Vanessa Haley is the author of The Logic of Wings. Her poetry has appeared in Rhino, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, The Grove Review, Inkwell, Southern Poetry Review, and other publications. Formerly a psychotherapist and an associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, she is now retired and lives in Delaware.