Two Poems, by Kyle Brosnihan
Nightingales
To kill a nightingale. To play with
its dead body. Flap its dead wings.
To throw a dead nightingale and
watch it fly through the air like
a stone. To juggle dead nightingales.
To read Keats’s Ode to the dead
nightingale. To taxidermy it. Cut,
rip out its guts, pump it full of
polyurethane and cotton. To freeze-
dry a nightingale. To put the trophy
on a little plinth on a desk and stare.
To find beauty in what you have
killed, processed, stuffed, and frozen
into a gesture of its former life. To pretend
a dead nightingale is a happy nightingale.
To kiss a dead nightingale. To spit on it.
To tear it apart and shred it and press it
into a dead nightingale meatball. To set
the red table. To light the dead candles.
To try again. To catch another nightingale.
To put it in an iron cage. To feed it dead
nightingales. To flay its dead nightingale
brother. To throw it the head of its dead
nightingale mother. To put the cage in a room
without windows. To replace the cage with
smaller and smaller cages. To put the cages
in a box and put the box in the cold ground.
To bury a living nightingale.To forget about it.
To move on. Try again. Catch another.
To give it drugs. To put acid in its water,
heroin in its wing, purple cough syrup
in its feed. To laugh at a fucked up nightingale.
To toss it in a glass jar full of smoke. To fill the jar
with water. To watch the nightingale writhe
and struggle to breathe. To place the jar on the stove
and click on the flame. To slowly boil a nightingale.
To hear a nightingale sing in pain. To watch
very carefully for that special moment
when the pain stops hurting. To take
before and after pics of the special
moment. To hang the photos of the living
and the dead nightingale within the same
wooden frame. To admit they look the same.
Notes from a Human Being
To be made of carbon has been a blast. It’s really cool
having blood and a heart and stuff. I dig breathing
air quite a bit. It feels nice in my lungs. I’m pleased
with feeling pleasure. I’m a little bummed about the pain
but whatever. I’ll live. I don’t know why I have earlobes
but I don’t mind. The brain is extraordinary although
I only know what scientists tell me. My toenails grow
like bark on a tree. My hair does funny things every day.
It’s strange, and a little scary, to think there’s so much
more universe apart from earth, and most of it isn’t made
of carbon. But once again I’m depending on the scientists.
I don’t even know what carbon really is but what really is
anything? My nipples get pointy and my skin shrivels
when it’s cold. I glisten with sweat in the summer heat.
I make noises with my mouth and carbony people like me
nod their heads. It’s all very nifty but if I could change
one thing, it’d be the cruelty. It’s everywhere.
In the back of everybody’s heads. In the houses.
In our hearts. People can be so mean. Children
get cruel things done to them. It hurts just to think about.
And wars, you know? Like, what’s up with them? Do they
have those on other planets? Is it the carbon making us
like this? Is it our brains? Our hearts? The scientists?
Is it the infinite space above our bodies driving us mad?
Kyle Seamus Brosnihan is a Filipino-American poet and playwright. Raised in Nebraska, he now lives in Brooklyn. He received his MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College in 2022. His poetry has been published in the Gordon Square Review, HAD, Apogee, Beautiful Days Press, and elsewhere.