Aidan Forster

Audubon’s Priority Bird List

1. Wood Stork

One night I met a boy who said he was a carpenter.
I offered him my body. He offered to carve it.
Under his hand I learned to be supple,
to make my whole body a muscle.

2. Snail Kite

When the boy could no longer speak he dug into the earth.
We were young, our bones just plucked from their birthplaces.
Together we overturned the water basin and found the blackness
beneath it. Invertebrates fell from its stone underskin in waves.
He dug ever deeper. I knelt on the grass, looked through him.
The worms and slugs writhed beneath his fingers. One snail
lay among the masses, blooming like a wound from the soil.

3. Little Blue Heron

Once I read that blue is the devil’s color, I decided to wear it always.
I became a being of wetness, moved like a cool sheet of water. I wore blue
to a party that wasn’t a party but really a get-together with an older girl
and her even older boyfriend. He was a fox and ate fire for a living,
swallowed the burning as easy as water. I asked him to teach me to eat
flames. He showed me the redness of his shoulders so I named him.
Red is not the devil’s color. This idolatry was short-lived—
the girl took God to her bedroom and left me with the cat.
It picked the blueness out of my eyes.

4. Roseate Spoonbill

Give me a rose and I will turn it into a mouth.
Give me my mouth and I will cease to speak.
I will fill my mouth with stones like the Patron Saint
of Earthen Silence, who does not exist. In French,
rose is the word for pink and rouge is the word
for red. At that party we threw roses on the floor,
from the balcony. That was the end of the night.
We stoppered our rose mouths and went home.

---

Ride

-after Peter LaBerge

I.
My childhood was microscopic. September:
the boy grabbed my hand,

put it on the gearshift and slid up and down.
It felt limb-like. I asked why six settings

and he said six was the first perfect number.
We went a hundred miles per hour on the interstate

and I was struck by the fact that my body
had never moved that fast before, all my particles

accelerating towards an autumn no one anticipated.

II.
All we’ve done are little things—
he pressed my thigh like it was a stone,

like he expected it to make a sound.
We made love in his queen bed and the whole time

I tried to remember the Japanese word
for a man seen only from behind.

Afterwards, he lit a cigarette and told me
about the time California was washed in snow.

I could not see his face.

III.
On the way home, he let me use the radio.
I know what we both considered:

neither of us knew how to say
we had never tasted the inside of someone

before this. When we reached my house
I gave him a five for gas and tried to decide

if he lived in an apartment or a hotel room.

---

Ghazal for Manhood

I am throwing a party to celebrate the existence
of coffee, sex, grassfire, the sea, bones, man.

On the path to the river I did not fall into
I made a house from shoreline rocks for a man.

Once, my grandfather and I ripped the skin
off dead animals, fresh-shot. I am not a man.

This bone. This blood. This dragon eyebrow.
All of this was half-given to me by a man.

We entered through the stage door in the middle of the performance.
Our faces reddened like blood moons, even the man’s.

Enkidu made love for seven days and seven nights—
exiting the woman, split from beasts, he became a man.

Sometimes an apple is enough to fill me. The orchard ripens
as it always has. I ripen in the presence of a man.

The boy says my name like it will break open in his mouth.
I have tasted, been tasted. All this to become a man.

---

Elegy

---

➥ Bio