I was going to buy a parakeet, but the laundromat lost my clothes

by Tolu Oloruntoba

Florian Olivo

By parakeet, I mean one of the books that speak to me in recto and verso blurs round my head, a songbird self, a voice I can bear to listen to. Call it budgerigar, its bungie hook coos talking, then strapping me down. By a parakeet, I meant more parakeets, levitating meathooks to halt my free fall. Next time. I am more prone to helium jumps, and osmium sways, and tightrope thoughts, now. Train platforms remind me of fragility. The laundromat, with its MonFri spin cycle, its dryer-sheet currency, called, taunted. The snap of the door had scattered, again, the thread from my clothes in sudden flocks of lint. I already knew. I had begun to sift down onto the November sidewalk. I, like the fabric of my clothes, emulating the down of my birds, no scaffold of beaks and claws to hold my strange, human, snow.

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Author's note: Grateful acknowledgment is made to Madeleine Corley, who provided the prompt, and title, for this poem.

Tolu Oloruntoba’s chapbook, Manubrium, is a finalist for the 2020 bpNichol Chapbook Award. The Junta of Happenstance, his debut poetry collection, will be published in 2021. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Divinity Review, PRISM International, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Surrey, British Columbia.