from Alexia

Alexia grows a flock of doves from seeds she finds under a rotting soda box, and I think Things always work out for her. Anywhere she goes, Alexia is voted most popular. Her teeth are whiter than anyone’s teeth. She swears she was born on the moon and everyone believes her, their eyes wide as water dishes as she shows us a crescent-shaped birthmark above her left hip. I don’t know if I believe her. Still, seeing that glimpse of skin is exciting.

*

Alexia says that after she was born on the moon she fell to Earth and landed in the sea. She doesn’t say which one, which makes me suspect it isn’t true. Especially because what comes next in the story is that a whale scooped her up in its cavern-like mouth and she lived there until last year, when she was old enough to go to school, and now here she is.

*

Lately I’ve been dreaming of Alexia. She’s rowing a boat and I’m floating along beside it. She asks me if I’d like a piece of cake. “No cake,” I say, then ask for a lock of her hair instead. She saws off a piece with the cake knife and hands it to me, but as soon as the strands touch the water they disappear.

*

Airplanes are always coming and going. From my favorite spot under my favorite tree in the front yard, I watch them crawling across the sky. At school, Mrs. Leipold shows us a website with a map of the world covered with little yellow airplanes. The map tracks where the planes are at any moment. Every seven seconds, they all shift slightly in whatever direction they’re going. According to the website there are 6,993 planes in the air. If you knew the number of a plane, you could type it in and see it on the map. If you saw a plane flying over your house, you could look at the website and see where it was going. If Alexia was flying somewhere, I could watch her plane inch across the map on the computer in my bedroom.

*

What if a person is looking at the plane-tracking website watching a plane that someone they love is on and the plane crashes? Would it disappear from the map? Would they know what happened?

*

I write a research paper on the migration patterns of mourning doves. According to the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, mourning doves are proficient at flying at around 30 days of age. They migrate twice a year, in the spring and fall. Some birds will choose not to migrate at all because of the abundance of food in bird feeders. I decide to buy a bird feeder with my allowance money.

*

Planes are like birds only less believable. On Amelia Earhart Day, Mrs. Leipold has us make posters to hang around the school. We print photos in the computer lab of Amelia and glue them onto construction paper, then write facts on the paper with scented markers. I choose grey-blue paper to match the ocean and, according to her pilot’s license, the color of her eyes.

*

According to the Amelia Earhart Museum’s website, Amelia and her sister Muriel once had two imaginary horses named Saladin and Beelzebub. If I had an imaginary horse, I would name it Apollo. If Alexia had an imaginary horse, we could ride away together.

*

Two birds build a nest in the rain gutter outside my window. I watch them for hours with a bird identification book that I got for Christmas across my lap. Finally I identify them as barn swallows, Hirundo rustica, subspecies H. r. erythrogaster. Barn swallows lay 4-6 eggs on average and will mob predators that come too close to their nest. Dad says that if the baby birds don’t leave the nest in time, a hard rain will flood the downspout and wash them away.

*

Horses don’t sing. A bird building a nest on a horse would be something. If the horse walked past and the bird was singing, you might think that the horse was singing.

Jessica Poli is Editor of Birdfeast Magazine, Poetry Editor for Salt Hill Journal, and an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Her first chapbook, The Egg Mistress, was published by Gold Line Press in 2013. She can be found at andthegoldrush.tumblr.com.