It was an eaglet, Lynn said.
She’d seen them on the news this morning.
Yesterday I’d come to her with something in my hands
That filled both palms. Skin gray, blue tinged,
Soft as human skin but thin. So newly dead
I expected a pulse against my palm.
Almost large as a cat, spots of black down,
Hollow tubes at the edges of wings where feathers
Would’ve grown in.
Debbie K. Trantow received her MFA from the University of Minnesota and was awarded the 2001 Gesell Summer Writing Fellowship. Her chapbook Hearing Turtle’s Words was published by Spoon River Poetry Press. She’s been published in Gertrude, The North Coast Review, The Wisconsin Review and other literary magazines and journals.