wound weather.
We’ve come to reward the shriek.
Anne Carson wrote, “It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.” I believe her. More now, as the pigeons return to my street and the summer heat hums from the wires. We are wound, and we wind each other. And we keep telling stories about the wound as if that’s the same as healing. But a wound isn’t the story. It’s what’s left behind. Pain isn’t the story, it’s the residue. The stain.
When I see pigeons now, I think of royalty. Not because they look like much—scruffed necks, greased feathers, pink claws like chewed erasers—but because they once were. Raised in towers, fed by hand, named and bred like diamonds. Ancient Mesopotamians kept them as sacred messengers. The Egyptians painted them into tombs. Pigeons were palace birds, prized for their loyalty and direction. The first war heroes with wings. We crowned them with utility. Their wings once meant favor from the gods. Now we hose them off bus benches.
Now they are vermin. They coo over broken glass and decorate the signage of banks. Their royalty unremembered. The fall from grace is not what makes them interesting. It’s that they still show up.
Grackles, though, are different. Grackles want to be seen. They want to be heard. In Texas, they scream from every light pole. They strut like they’ve won something. They split the air with their presence. I respect them. But pigeons undo me.
Grackles belong to the Icterid family—related to blackbirds, cowbirds, and orioles—but they’ve made Texas their stage. Sharp-voiced and metallic, their feathers catch light like oil slicks. They perch on power lines and stare you down in the H-E-B parking lot. They dance in traffic signals, memorizing light change choreography. They make performance from survival.
If pigeons are memory, grackles are broadcast.
If pigeons are ache, grackles are declaration.
If pigeons are wound, grackles are weapon.
Thalia Field’s “Apparatus from the Inscription of a Falling Body” is not about pigeons in the way you think it might be. She does not tell stories about birds, or the people who feed them. She fragments. She denies the reader a narrative arc.
“I’m skipping past the story-part,” she writes. “It’s not the point.”
Instead, she gives us accumulation. Echo. A clubfooted pigeon, an injured wing, a bird that can’t fly but still arrives.
“No more story. Just time. Just injury.”
Field doesn’t offer catharsis. She doesn’t ask pain to arc. She lets it stay in its body. That resistance—not just to story, but to resolution—left a mark.
We’ve lost the ability to attend to injury unless it is loud.
Unless it is captioned, captionable.
Timed to release at 8:00 a.m. with the slideshow queued and a swipe-up to donate.
But Field says no.
Field stays with the limping.
The ongoing.
The pain without punctuation.
A kind of pain that can’t be diagrammed.
That just limps forward.
It made me think about how we measure pain. Which brought me to Eula Biss. Her essay “The Pain Scale” tries to scale the unscalable. Zero to ten.
“Zero,” she writes, “is not a number.”
Pain resists closure. Even her structure, numbered but nonlinear, enacts the chaos she critiques.
“I don’t know what my number is,” she writes. “I only know what my body remembers.”
That line pressed into something already sore.
Because my body remembers, too.
Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” doesn’t just narrate grief: it sits with it, watches it weather. What she writes is not resolution but residue. Long walks on the moor. Half-spoken arguments in the kitchen. A father slipping into dementia. She gives us absence that accumulates. Her mother asks, “Why hold onto all that?” and Carson answers, “Where can I put it down?”
That question doesn’t beg healing.
It begs a location.
A shelf. A landing spot for pain that won’t arc.
That’s what this is, maybe. A kind of glass essay of my own.
Not a story, but a room.
Not a cry, but a coo.
I press metaphor like a bruise.
Pigeons as pain.
Pain as the sacred made mundane.
Pigeons don’t ask to be loved. They arrive. They take up space on balconies, on wires, in memory. Their loyalty is unearned. They circle back. They don’t need to shriek. They are the memory that coos.
Grackles weaponize presence.
Pigeons survive in silence.
Grackles show off.
Pigeons remember.
We’ve come to reward the shriek.
Twenty-six nights ago, I fell off my bike. A fast teetering fall. Bruising bloomed. Road rash down the cheekbone. But no fracture. No stitches. Just a pulsing awareness. And the strange grace of healing so fast. I wore a helmet. I got lucky.
Pain deserves the art we give it. But what if pain also deserves our inarticulate, sustained attention? What if it deserves to be cooed over, not solved? To be named not for its drama, but for its persistence?
Maybe I’m here to rot beautifully, in the heat, with the pigeons.
Carson said it’s easier to tell of the wound. But maybe the harder part is knowing when to stop telling it. When to kneel beside it. When to name it—not for how loud it gets, but for how long it stays.
Pain isn’t the whole story.
It’s not a crown. Not a currency. Not a monument.
It’s a room you can live in too long.
I’m still learning how to carry it better.
Still learning when to let it rest.
Still learning how to leave the palace.
But I want out.
The bruise has faded.
The memory hasn’t.
The pavement remembers.
And I do, too.
Works Referenced & Inspired
Thalia Field, “Apparatus from the Inscription of a Falling Body”
Eula Biss, “The Pain Scale”
Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”
Ryan Sherrell, “Pain Body” (A song on his Facebook so I can’t link to it but maybe now he will put it on Soundcloud *hint hint*)
Thank you for reading. If this stayed with you, a single 🫧 Lava Drop helps keep the light on.