In Praise of Two Hawks Fucking

I am running along the left shoulder of Runyon Canyon

looking for rabbit and owl and

hawk and hummingbird and coyote

while dawn clears her throat

over the sleepy, sleeping city, and the

light is ready to fall in thick waves

like a girl unpinning her hair and shaking her head.

I do this every morning, enter this state of grace

like stepping into a Skinner box and pushing the bar. Everyday,
*

every day I push the bar again and again

because sometimes, some days, a pellet of rapture drops:

rabbit leaps and darts and plunges into the scrub, owl screams

and sighs, hawk shrieks and floats above my head, across the sky,

hummingbird dazzles and darts and plunges, coyote appears and

disappears before me and behind, skin and bones bundled under a rough

coat.

This morning a pellet fell, then another. One hawk,

*

then another, hurling themselves at each other, as if brawling,

as if the answer to any question you might ask is this feathered body, as if

they were trying to take each other by the throat

and rip open their bodices.

I have never seen such exquisite pornography, this ballet

of shrieking lust, and O! what is there to do, but kneel

and turn the pages of the sky, servant to this joy.

About the Author

A Class of 2007 Antioch graduate; Flint’s poetical influences run the gamut from the sublimely straightforward Sharon Olds to the transcendental musings of Mary Oliver. She is devoted to bridging the gap between mainstream and marginalized discourses by way of academically creative writing, and her current project pairs her passion for postmodernist queer theory with her inimitable stick-figure panache in the creation of a series of playfully barbed “children’s books for adults.” Flint’s work has been published in a variety of journals, and she has performed in a wide-range of venues—from tiny neighborhood coffeehouses to internationally-renowned Highways performance space and the grand theatre of the Cultural Olympiad.