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Fish or Bird Body
Kristin George Bagdanov (bio)

Blue heron on the bank
purple gradient of wing
strained neck to pluck a fish
from the stream.

What is it like
to see that great shadow
hover above? I’m trying not to
make this a metaphor
but I have to ask
which I would be: fish
or bird, the water, the dam?

The heron swallows
a sleek length of trout and I
imagine it convulsing like jonah
inside the whale except
there is another metaphor
and now I am asking god how he calls
the fish food and not the man and I am asking
again what I am—
fish or bird or man?
All of them convulsing
each inside the other?

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