Anna Barker

Crow

I watch him ransack a rabbit, though it’s not ‘til he flips it
I see the scut.
He shows me the easy-in, an incision wide enough to bury his head
then up and up
under a skirt of skin to unhitch the lumbar vertebrae.

There’s tenderness in his work, or precision. I pretend to
know the difference
while on a stone he lays the bags and pipes, finds an end;
shows me
the heart, the stomach, the spleen.

Looking at him, I see a surgeon, or an artist or
something in-between,
not the violence that frightened me so much I hid
until he’d preened
himself clean.

Crow therapy

He leaves slugs on my pillow
to get me out of bed. He pecks an apple
so I’ll have to eat the rest.

He tells me he’s hunting spiders when
really he’s dissecting my
hope-to-get-fucked knickers.

He calls this behaviour ‘intervention’
a get-out-of-bed, out-of-my-own-head
breakdown cessation.

Fine, we can sit here among the snowdrops
in the weak spring sun. I’ll smoke cigarettes;
we’ll call it fun.

Get a job? He sounds like my sister:
socks up, glass down
but he doesn’t know what it’s like,

drinking all day, raging all night
I mightn’t even be
depressed — sometimes I laugh.

I don’t drink because I have a problem,
I drink because the world is
a problem — I drink to fit.

Anna Barker published her debut collection of short stories, Rain Hare, in 2022 with Iron Press. She has also published two novels with Penguin Random House writing as Anna Ralph, Floating Island and Before I Knew Him. As a poet she is published in Humana Obscura and Acumen, forthcoming in Typehouse Literary Magazine, and she is winner of the 2022 Indigo Dreams Publishing Prize for her poem, ‘My hen as my vagina - a love letter’. Her crow poems are from her debut collection, Book of Crow, which will be published by Indigo Dreams in 2023.