To Drown a Crow
a story in prosetry and spoken word
I followed him to the jail, but the bars of justice were too weak to hold him, and they dissolved under the weight of he-said-she-said; he slipped through, dripped through like ooze, like slime, like the slippery dicks who say we’re always asking for it anyway.
Some time later I put a dead crow on the windshield of his car, parked in front of my house, a big beater of a thing, all rims and misplaced testosterone; he was my neighbor after all, and after all that he still couldn’t keep that rusty bumper from crossing over into my space; an invader of space, that’s what he was, believing his big, jutting things could and should and would assert themselves upon other people’s property.
The crow had drowned in the bucket of stagnant water around the pony keg in my backyard, the same water that used to be ice around the same keg from the same party I threw Saturday night where that same neighbor had once been a guest, had once returned later all alone after drowning himself in a different bucket, a bucket of Budweisers and probably Crown and Coke, and broke into my house then my bedroom then my passive, passed-out personal space.
I guess the water got stagnant from all that slime, from too-weak bars, from closed-down bars, from badly-parked cars, until I just wasn’t able to clean up the mess from that party, until the pony keg and its bucket of melted ice stayed in the yard for a bit too long, how long, I don’t really know, but it was long enough anyway to drown a crow.
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. There are ribbons and memes and hashtags, but it is important to remember that beneath the symbols are people and stories.
Writing poetry is one of the ways I release old trauma that has been stored deep within my soul. This is my shadow work. Thank you, dear readers, for holding space.
Listen to the author read this story on SoundCloud
As a mother of two young children, Skye Nicholson found freedom from alcohol addiction in 2018 and currently works as an empowerment coach, paying it forward by helping others to find freedom from what may be holding them back. Her first book of collected works, Unexpected Alchemy is available here.
