on coming back as a buzzard
I read this soon after it was published and think of it often. When I was small I whined for the chicken heart when my mother made chicken and dumplings. I also got in trouble for poking at the dead iced fishes’ eyes in the grocery store. Perhaps I’m a buzzard come back as a human.
Excerpt from On Coming Back as a Buzzard (If you believe in coming back)
by Lia Purpura
Published in the September/October 2009 issue of Orion magazine
Yes, it looks like I hover, and the hovering, I know, suggests a discomfiting eagerness. Malevolence. Why is that? I haven’t killed a thing. If the waiting seems untoward, it may be confirming something too real, too true: all the parts that slip from sight, can’t be easily had, collapse in on themselves and require digging, all the parts that promise small, intense bursts of sweetness unnerve us—while the easily abundant, the spans, the expanses (thick haunch, round belly and shoulder), all that lifts easily to another’s lips, and retains its form till the end—seems pure. Right and deserved. Proper and lawful. Thus butchers have their neat diagrams. One knows to call for chop, loin, shank, rump.
I’d get to be one who, when passed the plate, seeks first the succulent eye. This would mark me: foreigner. Stubborn lover of scraps and dark meat. Base. Trained on want and come to love piecemeal offerings—the shreds and overlooked tendernesses too small for a meal, but carefully, singularly gathered—like brief moments that burst: isolate beams of sun in truck fumes, underside of wrist against wrist, sudden cool from a sewer grate rising. I incline toward the tucked and folded parts (the old country can’t be bred out of me), the internals with names that lack correspondence, the sweetbreads and umbles, bungs, hoods, liver-and-lights. If the road is a plate, then the outskirts of fields and settlements where piles are heaped are plates, too. And the gullies, the ditches, the alleys—all plates. I’d get to reorder your thoughts about troves, to prove the spilled and shoveled-aside to be treasure. To reconfer notions of milk and honey, and how to approach the unbidden.
