Blackbird Archive
← v13n1, Spring 2014
Poetry · Volume 13, Number 1

Cassowary

Rodney Gomez

after you kissed a slurry of words into my needling mouth

I stumbled into a swatch of flightless crows,

scissored my way through a field of flightless crows

after you sanded & papered my heart, decided to petrify,

begin anew with a pin from the spine of a weathered house

a cassowary parted the air with two black razors

pinned to a funeral barge on the black river,

stumbled into a field of flightless crows

desirebodyviolencemyth
Rodney Gomez

Rodney Gomez’s work has appeared in Fourteen Hills , Denver Quarterly , Nimrod , Devil’s Lake , Salt Hill , Barrow Street , and RHINO , among other journals. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas–Pan American and a BA from Yale University. Gomez was a 2011 CantoMundo Fellow and has received residencies from the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the Santa Fe Art Institute. He sits on the board of Migrant Health Promotion, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health and well-being of migrants, immigrants, and related populations. Photo by Isaac Chavarria