Dakota Reed

A woman in my neighborhood’s Facebook group asks, “where do the geese go at night?”

with little to no
context for her question
which lingers with me
as I sit on the toilet
and mindlessly scroll
and I think about their elongated
necks draped in moonlight and I,
too, wonder where they go, where
they are, where they want
to be. One Halloween I dressed up
as a goose and drank too much gin and passed
out in a sticky nightclub booth: black leather,
white feathers. A stranger tried
to convince me to come home
with him, stroked my arm lying
limp across the table and
whispered he would take care of me,
to just let him bring me back. I think
of the summer I kept seeing dead
birds and kept Googling what it meant,
how I felt like it was a kind of omen,
a sort of feathered foreboding, perhaps
for some night when some man
would want to take home some
broken bird and do with it what
men do.

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Dakota Reed is a copyeditor for Atmosphere Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the College of Charleston, where she was a Woodfin Fellow and senior editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. Her work is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, has been published in Blood Orange Review and has been awarded the Poetry Society of South Carolina’s Nancy Walton Pringle Memorial Prize, College of Charleston’s MFA Creative Writing Prize and honorable mention in AWP’s Intro Journals Project.