MEN AND STARLINGS AND WOMEN
by SARA HOVDA
After “Linnets” by Larry Levis
I.
My father has lived, beyond death, for two decades
on the glissando of the green-black birds
he once shot for sport.
The summer just past his dying, I heard,
from inside the rotting barn—
birdsong.
The great starling stood, ten-feet-tall,
surrounded by her subjects,
readying a .22 for my father’s return.
Her eyes so wide I sensed no lids.
She discerned in concentric circles
whether I deserved her mercy.
When she lowered her rifle
I spoke of my father’s death by cancer.
She muttered a harsh trill.
II.
On the anniversary of my father’s passing,
dozens of starlings sit in the birch tree above his grave
and descend, one after another,
scratch at the frozen soil skirted with snow
to be sure he can’t reemerge.
III.
The starlings still sing in Grand Meadow, Minnesota.
The cold men of that Midwest town
have fallen easily in love with their lilt and echo
for over a century, and they do not shoot.
This was the contract my father broke.
IV.
The great starling spared me. I’d held the rifle, shaking,
straight-legged on the gravel, yet I never fired at her sweeping retinue.
There’s no coward or pacifist in her estimation.
Only the black gun barrel in my hands clear of residue.
V.
I’m not like my father, who drank himself to sleep, or my brother, who left for a bigger city, who no longer talks to me. I was a boy, but became my mother, who has only ever discharged a gun at the firing range, the outline on the distant paper target. She couldn’t stomach it. You must become one of your parents, someone told me, and I chose. I’ve never heard a song from the papery branches and thought to snap the plump clarinet’s neck. But I’ve heard such a sound and thought, what if I could make one tone even half as beautiful.
VI.
My grandpa met the great starling once.
He begged her forgiveness for his son.
She didn’t listen, so he laid his rifle at her feet.
VII.
Riverside, California,
land of the yellow-billed magpie
with its white belly
and the black tail nearly as long as the glistening year,
and of the thrasher, almost monochrome brown,
but pale under the throat
like any creature who hasn’t looked up
to see if the rope would fit.
I have come for the gold eyes
of sunlight between oak branches—
and for birdsong.
VIII.
Where is the great quail?
Windsong through sequoia leaves.
Where may I settle?
IX.
In dreams my arms sprout into wings, my fingers feather with silver spots as if spackled with liquid metal. I nest in the barn rafters. My brother beneath me screams. He is my brother from the waking world. I dart for the light, swerve drunk in the morning wind. My father, who has found his way to me in death, stands along the driveway, steadies his aim. He fires, and I’m spun through with lead dying. Thank God, for once, I am beautiful enough for someone to want my death as souvenir.
X.
The sun in Riverside doesn’t care for moderation,
but the mockingbird does, with its syncopated cry.
Some mornings I want to step into the nearly burning grass
and wait for some wirehaired bird dog to take me.
XI.
I wake in moonlight roped to my bed. I don’t know the safeword, so I
try many things: barbell, football, IPA. The light against my chest
shows I’ve really become a woman. After an hour, I find the right
sound: the starling’s glissando—desperation.
XII.
When my mother visits California, I don’t sing.
I don’t wear skirts or spray my peony perfume.
I can’t talk to her the way I talk to anyone
who didn’t know me before the bruise of manhood healed.
I’ve become her, and she calls me daughter,
but I can’t escape those first twenty-seven years.
She waits for me to be the woman I promised her.
When she blinks—this can’t be my fault—
I shiver again into starlings.
Sara Hovda is a transgender woman from rural Minnesota. She currently attends the MFA program at UC-Riverside while also working as a streamer on Twitch. Her first book, Night’s Grammar, won the Trio Award and will be published by Trio House Press in July of 2027. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as North American Review, South Dakota Review, Permafrost, and Shō Poetry Journal, among others. She can be found online at SaraHovda.com
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