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  • Quiscalus mexicanus (Great-Tailed Grackle)
  • Henrietta Goodman (bio)

. . . these vagabond troopers, so common everywhere as to come under the contempt of familiarity.

—The Coues Check List of North American Birds, 1882

Familiarity is not our problem. Our problem is the birds in the tree next door—all winter, squawking deep in the only green. By April, so loud I can barely hear you. On the ground they wobble, tails cocked like skewed keels, the sheen of their feathers like oil on wet asphalt. White-eyed, their sockets look pecked clean. At dusk, at dawn, they shriek the soundtrack to the shower scene in Psycho, violins composed to screech like grackles, like a knife ripping flesh: rank-rank-rank-rank, reek-reek-reek-reek-reek, the sound you make when you mean to say a woman’s crazy. If you could hear me, I’d say it’s a woman being murdered. You’d say too dumbto lock the door. I’d say don’t go. You’d say lock the door. Even now, ornithologists disagree over what Linnaeus meant by Quiscalus—maybe an onomatopoieticon, maybe early Portuguese for quail, or maybe from the Spanish quisquilla: a trifling dispute, a triviality, or the Latin quisquiliae for refuse, dregs,the small twigs and leaves which fall from trees. So the birds are fighting over nothing, as we do. Or the Latin quis for who. We hear it all day and all night, that stabbing arm raised, a whirlpool of blood down the drain, reek-reek-reek-reek and even now, I hardly know you. Who is crazy? Who to blame? Quis? [End Page 192]

Henrietta Goodman

Henrietta Goodman is a Ph.D. student in English at Texas Tech University. Her first book of poetry, Take What You Want, was published in 2007 by Alice James Books, and more of her poems have recently appeared in Massachusetts Review, Guernica, FIELD, and other journals.

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