One of the Scarlet Macaws urinates on me
as I kneel down to change the newspapers in his cage,
then a small green Parakeet laughs and says,
“Pretty girl, hahaha, pretty girl,” over and over again.
Outside the bars that keep these 200 birds grounded,
I feel a modicum of safety. This is no tropical paradise,
just a house in a neighborhood in the Northeast on a
snowy day with almost every room filled with cages
containing rescued, abandoned or boarded birds.
My daughter is trying to get a Cockatoo to dance.
She bops up and down and pleads you can do it.
There is a bird who sings Justin Bieber songs, another
who will pinch your butt if you turn your back on him,
and two African Greys whose own mother ate their feet off.
There are different reasons why we end up where we are,
some of which make sense. I haven’t visited my incarcerated
brother in over a year, but I am here cleaning and refilling water
and food bowls for birds with names like those given to inmates—
Elvis, Baby, Pirate, Shadow, Crash, Diablo, Angel, Skittles.
My daughter is fascinated with the Cockatiel who spits food
through the bars of his cage at her. Mom, do you think they are
happy locked up like this? she asks. This is the closest
I dare bring her to visiting her uncle, and this is the closest
she’ll come to asking me how he is doing. And because it’s not that
birds can’t cry it’s just that they don’t, I continue to pull
the soiled newspaper from the cages without opening the doors.