If I Were a Blackbird

The feathers started as the coarse black hairs that grew out of the mole between my human shoulder blades.

If I were a blackbird, I had sung, the Scottish ballad about losing love to long stints at sea, but I didn’t mean it.

I’d whistle and sing. I’d follow the ship that my true love sails in, it goes, even though everyone knows to not whistle at sea. Even seabirds know to trill only once they’re tucked-in on land or under a ship’s yard or maybe between gadgets on top of a pilothouse, now that ships don’t have yards anymore. Why would anyone ever whistle, even if they became a blackbird? Whistling only brings too much wind. And trouble.

And on the top rigging, I’d dare build my nest, I’d sung, although his boat doesn’t have top rigging. It has davits, but I know better than to plan anything solid on something that moves so much. That’s why I stayed on land. I have my licenses too–tankerman, able-bodied seaman, more qualifications than him. So much sea-time. So much time around men that move. Sailors are like seabird colonies; they stick around long enough to shit on everything and migrate away.

So I got a job in the port, and I stayed to watch the bay freeze and the Coast Guard icebreaker try to make it out to the buoys while I did paperwork in the winter, sipping inedible coffee from a seasoned thrift-shop pot tinted sepia by fluorescents and sometimes his presence, when he made it back on some container ship docked somewhere farther south and found some barely running pickup to limp back up here.

I knew I should have never sang If I Were a Blackbird with the trad band at the Irish pub on our second date. It introduced the idea that I might follow him, or that he could whistle up a wind to blow me to wherever he happened to be. But the bay wind blows in from the sea, scooping up ice floes to stack on land. It does not sweep up people and deposit them in the middle of the Atlantic, no matter how much anyone whistles.

But the hair growing out of the mole on my back still split into the barbs of feathers yesterday, and the mole sprouted into downy after-feather like a puffed rice grain under a magnifying glass. From the first feather, more grew along my spinal column and over my deltoids like a tawny green-black blanket, or a cape, that eventually creeped down my trapezoids. Over my breasts. My legs shortened, and my nose, which had always been crooked, stayed pointed and down bearing as my neck extended until I could no longer resist running out the port office door to the bay and diving in the water.

A visiting biologist, a rare break from the sailor boys in the bars here, once told me cormorants’ most common cause of death is exhaustion. They dive and don’t bank enough energy to return to the surface, to land, to rest.

And I’d flutter my wings o’er her lilly white chest, the chorus ends, and that’s what it looked like when they tried to resuscitate me, from my perch above my body, after the bay wind blew it back to shore. A body does not hold the same superstitions about whistling, especially under chest compressions, so I whistled then, and maybe that’s what brought himbecause he arrived to witness his twisted wish fulfilled, that I had turned into a bird when he was ready to nest.

About the Author

Kira Córdova is a writer and sometimes tall ship sailor from the great seafaring state of Colorado working on an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. They have essays and poems upcoming in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social and Anger is a Gift: Anthology of Resistance and Response Poems to the 2024 Election from Flowersong Press.