Pigeon Meditations
by Rachel Kuanneng Lee
lately, i am obsessed with bending backwards
something about the chest lifting, shoulders
breaking, head falling, cervical bones curving
my neck back to the earth. to do this
while resting gently on your shins and forearms
is called kapotasana—pigeon pose.
believe me when i say i have not seen a pigeon
like this before. the closest was that one time
i opened the door to my balcony and
there was a dead dove lying on the floor. its head
smashed open—deep, red blood pooling
out floor-side. my partner took care of it
with a pair of rubber gloves, and i wiped away
the darkness congealed—a two-person operation.
one time, i opened my room door to find my sister
lying in a pool of her own pill-induced puke—
taking care of that was a five-person operation.
i don’t know what you’re supposed to feel
when these sorts of things happen, but in kapotasana,
because your throat is constricted
from the backwards incline, it gets hard to breathe.
on the ride to the hospital, i mostly thought
about how i was going to tell my friends, how to tell them
that aside from the not-breathing,
i wasn’t really feeling anything.
that night, alone, i fingered myself,
for the first time in months, knowing she was
somewhere else. i fingered myself to a gasping orgasm
every single night she spent away.
do you know what pigeonholes are? where i live,
the teaching staff in school have little cubbyholes
where they can deposit things; we call these pigeonholes.
i always wondered how many live pigeons
you could fit into a pigeonhole. probably three—
max—if you can keep them there.
when i was eight, mom put one of those pigeons
underneath a thick clay pot, meant for plants.
the pigeon had a busted wing and mom
wanted to fix it, but it kept trying to get away.
in the end, she lifted the pot and let it go.
we watched it from our porch—the frantic,
beating mess, all feet and feathers flapping,
wrestling itself down the corridor. i don’t know
if it goes hurtling down the ledge, or
if it somehow manages to fly. i just know
we don’t find the body.
Rachel Kuanneng Lee is a poet. Her work appears in or is forthcoming at Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, The Tiger Moth Review, wildness, the Live Canon 2020 Anthology, Entropy and elsewhere. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. She is also co-founder of a data science startup and hopes that someday, she might be able to make a coherent narrative out of her career choices, even if today is not quite that day. You can find her online at rachel-lee.me.
