Elizabeth Bradfield

Of Flight

Or frightened, said Eliza, and, grass blade
tremoring where I held it above the still
head of the grasshopper, I knew she
was right.
Seconds earlier, the bright
yellow clap of flight had startled up & caught
my predator-quick eye. We’d been talking
about art, music & what we might make
together, the world’s bad news held
aside, pushed back like a curtain so we
could peer into something else.
And
I saw it. Tracked it as it landed, folded,
settled small and inconspicuous: dull, dun. Then
my torn pointer, pointing: Look. So bold,
as we stilled together above it, unmoving
but no longer unseen on a path mown through
a small field.
I knew it took air into its body
through small holes along its abdomen, knew how
it rasped song, leg pulled against forewing, its own
instrument.  But see what I’d forgotten
again.
My loud attention turned threat before
I could think and check it…Innocent.
Innocent.  Yet I think now of woman
after woman stepping into sudden speech,
naming predators we knew and named
among ourselves, beating hard into flight, both
bold & frightened, bright & seen—

—fall 2018

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Writer/naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion and elsewhere. Winner of the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, her awards also include a Stegner Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Scholarship and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press and a contributing editor at the Alaska Quarterly Review, she lives on Cape Cod with her partner and is Associate Professor and co-director of creative writing at Brandeis University.