Performance

We had gone to the aviary in the empty country
an hour away because you said

it was the sort of thing interesting people did,
and in that green gazebo smelling of honey

and hay, sacks of birdseed slashed in the middle,
you cupped both your stubbed fingers to the glass

and leaned over the chipped guardrail, though
not on your tiptoes. All you could see

was a sparrow, a single one, picking the dirt
then looking up at you, unblinking. I saw it

chirp, sing to you like it loved you, with its onyx eyes
and mouth gilded with millet kernels. But mostly

I was looking at everyone else, the girls
flitting by in their plumage, skirts that reflected the sun

and bright teeth, and I was reaching
for your hands, still cupped to the glass.

You studied that little sparrow, flying up to you
and then hitting the glass, and said,

what a waste of twenty dollars. We left,
and you found more interesting ways to spend our time.

So you tossed me a pebble, and I made it a gem.
You told me to follow, and I hit

the glass. You asked me what the fuck
I was doing, and I sang you a song.

Charlotte Hughes is from Columbia, South Carolina. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in CutBank, Waxwing, PANK, Meridian, West Branch, Best Microfiction 2021,and Monkeybicycle, and her poetry has been honored by The Kenyon Review, Third Coast, Princeton University, and The UK Poetry Society, among others. She is the recipient of the 2020 Meridian Short Prose Prize and is a 2020 Foyle Young Poet.