Killdeer
by Nick Flynn

Read the automated transcript.

You know how it pretends
to have a broken wing to
lure predators away from its
nest, how it staggers just out of
Reach? If, at this moment,
you’re feeling metaphorical,
nest can be the whatever
inside us that we think needs
protection, the whatever that is
small & hasn’t yet found its
way. Like us, it has lived so long
on scraps, on what others have
left behind, it thinks it could live
on air, on words, forever almost,
it thinks it would be better to let
the predator kill it than to turn
its back on that child again,
forgetting that one lives inside
the other.

"Killdeer" by Nick Flynn, from I WILL DESTROY YOU by Nick Flynn, copyright © 2019 Graywolf Press. Used by permission of Graywolf Press.