Dear crow calling from the other side,

You brought me a letter stuffed with mulberries, twigs, and softly collected silver threads of the katydid and dropped it in the house where I lived unexpectedly. There was a child dying and a mother whirling around her, listening to her dreams. In my dreams I danced with the child and pulled her in a red wagon through the snow. In the dream I was the child and she was the grandmother. Those days were bathtubs of rosemary and calendula, drum beats from a distant country. And like a flash, the metallic slick of your wings caught my eye as you flew off. Waiting for an answer, you paced on the roof of a mill, long abandoned, calling out in a dialect of black I couldn’t decipher. I set the words from your letter on my window ledge: nesting fur from the milkweed’s tongue, brown twigs covered in silver thorns; the berries bled, and twigs dark and purple wound around my fingers. But when it came time to speak, to answer in words, I was muted by the largess of the gifts, the weight of translation: black cliffs plunged into a windy sea, the tug of tree root and worm, the ineffectual scratching of hands, the terror of beak on flesh.

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