A man looks at his reflection and sees a bird. The bird is round and pale. It looks like the moon made of dead strawberries. The man looks away. He picks up a brush and sets it back down. It does not matter what he does with the brush. The man opens his lips and spits out a caw. His wing-blades leave nests on the floor when he shivers. He steps in the dislocated feathers and twigs. The shower turns itself on. The man tries not to blink. The bird blinks three times. He remembers his first love on the beach, swallowing each other in white sand next to bullet carcasses. He hasn’t touched a woman since, but looks at every one he sees—women in grocery stores, his next-door neighbor, the divorcé who only wears green jackets, faded movie stars with sagging breasts and stretched-out nipples, the store mannequins on Main Street. He looks at all of them and collects their gaze, plastic and singular, and stiches beaks to their hair.

Remi Recchia is an MFA candidate in Poetry at Bowling Green State University, where he serves as Assistant Poetry Editor for the Mid-American Review. He has been published in Blue River Review, Front Porch, Gravel, Glass, and Ground Fresh Thursday Press, among others.