Sgraffito

  
Hunger sits in the hollow of the upper back,
not in the stomach’s pit, as our bodies misinform us.
 
Here, wing bones might yet issue from the scapula,
it only takes years of the right diet, thick with calcium,
 
and a friend with sandpaper, pressure-sensitive hands,
and the patience to scour layers of skin away
 
gently, to meet confined wings at the precise moment
they must unfold and shake feathers into air,
 
or be left forever hunched over the shoulder blades
like the curve of a gibbous moon, never quite full.
 
It is the scraping away that matters most, for in truth,
wings begin to pupate with the first slough of skin.
 
The hunger abates not from any steady diet but
once the body opens its breath of wings.
 
Now the true ordeal: hunger replaced by bafflement,
what to do with these appendages.
 

Mary Catherine Harper has poems in The Comstock Review, Cold Mountain Review, SLAB, Pudding Magazine, MidAmerican, and New England Review. She received the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, and her chapbook Some Gods Don't Need Saints was recently released. She organizes an annual Swampfire Retreat for artists and writers.