Listen: a son broken open by his father’s body is becoming a starling.

We could call the father a sphinx moth lured to the boy’s nectarless throat. We could
call the glottal stops between his son’s stifled night calls an espionage of
pollen, an iron-studded infusion of musk.

But the son is not a swath of torn plumeria blossoms. He’s a sweat-split Eden where
no only means the sun is casting its mercy down, and he’s growing wings.

I want to tell you a story about fathers and sons, but it begins and ends with
a daughter.

I want to tell you about a son who bears a son in his image, but I’m asking you
to blur transfiguration with the Law of the Father.

Follow me to Des Plaines, White Fish Bay, a small town in Georgia I don’t have
to name: let’s watch the sons, blood in their flight feathers as they coil and
thrash.

Let’s watch the daughter raising her arms against the scale-free correlation become
another Angel of History.

Wherever a father’s asphyxiating on shame and vermouth, there are bottles
catching in his daughter’s heart like the pierce of starling song—not a
warning, but an urging.