STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
ADELAIDE GIFFORD
I want to skip school, watch this wiggling
of inanimate objects becoming animate, remember
this prenatal pageantry, this breakthrough of beaks.
One eggs pirouettes, quivering with chirps, bumping
back and forth in impatience at its trappings. The first beak
emerges, poked between the white membrane, past shell,
its flakes flicking away, a crust of cracks cresting around the circumference.
Then the membrane becomes shrink-wrap, sucks itself
tight around the fragile body still trying
to breathe, to be born.
And I think, this is how I see them die:
before they’re even born, beak already broken through,
breathing until the straightjacket called home
becomes suffocating.
And then there’s an unfurling, invisible zipper
pulled back, membrane wrested away to reveal
rosy flesh still visible beneath white fluff not yet puffed.
She sleeps against the walls of her siblings, of the
not-yet-living, waking herself in fits
of chirps, still neck-bent in memory or her shell.
The wet leaches from her feathers,
until she’s gone from drowned rat to new
dandelion.
And she and I watch the petals of pink shell
unzip, dry, fall away,
like three seasons in the span of half an hour.
There are two.
The final egg. Through four cracks, barely visible, a closed eye.
Flakes of fallen white that rise and
fall with her breath.
Her siblings trample their own shucked shells
to dust, and she pushes her still-curled toes
against her confines, cracks sprawling until
she’s broken free, flops out backward and swollen with sleep.
And they rest against one another
in dinosaur arms and soft, bent bodies,
their world just a bit
bigger.
Adelaide Gifford is a recent graduate of Hamilton College in New York, where she majored in Creative Writing and double-minored in Hispanic Studies and Environmental Studies. Her favorite genre to write is a mixture of nature writing and fantasy, with a bit of magical realism thrown in, and her favorite authors include Richard Powers, Harper Lee, Billy Collins, and Brandon Mull. She has previously published fiction pieces in Sucarnochee Review and Penumbra Online, a graphic narrative piece, “The Lepidopterist,” in The Core Review, and poems in Glass Mountain, and The Wayfarer, among others. When she’s not writing, she enjoys hanging out with her dog and exploring the natural world. Instagram @adelaideluciagifford.
