He slept that night in his mother's house
where fifteen birds molted a drift,
a wool coat on every surface
soft as bee's fur. He had no affinity
for birds or her poodles that demanded
with pointed noses, licking,
licking, licking his leg.

Draped in costume jewelry, his mother
watched television, the phone a hotline
to happy in her hand. She bought every
zirconium, popbead, bugle brooch, earring
and bracelet that tacked itself onto the screen,
rigid and curved, a petrified comma
speaking to a salesman yes, yes
exactly what I always wanted.

He stepped into his childhood room,
the blonde-wood bed surrounded by boxes
of newspapers, his father's clothes,
feathers, peeled back the covers
to find a dead field mouse
no bigger than his thumb
curled as if asleep.

There was little Kim could do,
knees bent in the small
seat of the aeroplane
flying so low over wheat,
then mountain he could see
cats in a yard, their copper
tongues like rivers spooling out.
The plane's doppleganger flew beneath.
He drank his rum, picked his cuticles
until they bled, hiding the little skins
in his pocket, a memento mori.