Red birds flew into my window every day for years, especially during Spring

and I asked my mother

what they were called.

“Cardinals,” she said,

“but I think they’re called to you,

I think—

I think they are for you.”

“Mom, I’ll give that one a name.”

And I did.

——-

I still see cardinals.

The red shocks me,

like a bloodstain in a new house.

——-

When my father almost died,

I was not worried and I did not ask many questions,

only saw his body in the bed, a green-blue-yellow-black mess,

a broken-bone nest,

with sticky pads stuck to his skin, sending electricity to his nerves, lest

they forget themselves.

——-

He had the car turned into a cube, and it is somewhere now,

the cage collapsed,

the rust blooming inside of itself.

The day my father chose to drive into a wall,

going somewhere from 100 to 200 miles an hour (I never asked him), they dubbed him Rocketman.

He flew.

The car toppled and twisted and regurgitated what it could;

it was an illness,

and it could have killed us.

My father is okay.

——-

My father went to an air show months ago to see how those streak clouds are made by planes,

and there was an accident

and he saw peoples’ bodies lying and dying.

He told my mother how he saw hands separate from their owners.

He has not told me these things.

——-

The cardinals have started to scare my father.

He sees them too

like bloodstains in a new house.