One Prose Poem by Jiang Liu (姜流)

 

The Birds Below the Station

The birds below the station have never seen a tree. They nest in the warm sleeves of abandoned coats and feed on the announcements that fall between trains. Most are the colour of dust. One has a red breast from living too long beside the emergency telephone.

At night the station attendant unlocks the storeroom and lets them out. They fly the length of the platform without rising above the yellow line. He has trained them, he says, though I have seen the way he steps aside when the smallest bird comes towards him.

I ask whether he has ever taken one into daylight. He tells me about a blue bird carried upstairs in a biscuit tin. At the entrance, it beat itself against the lid so violently that he brought it back. When he opened the tin, the bird was white. It lived another winter.

Before the first train, we gather the birds with a broom. The attendant sweeps softly, and they move ahead of the bristles, folding their wings with a dry sound like tickets being counted. One stays behind on a bench. From its beak comes my mother's voice, telling me the soup is getting cold.

The attendant waits while I sit beside it. There is still time, he says, but he keeps his hand on the broom.

Jiang Liu (姜流) is a writer of poetry and short fiction.