BionicPigeon Wingon the Roadside

There’s just this single wing synthesis, just one part leftfrom the bionic pigeon. The curb is thick with road dustand titanium bones still make shape. Red wires spitpound. Maybe the automaton flies in circles with just

one wing, searching, programmed for searching, a lostpiece of self. Or maybe each part has found its way. Brainof silicon in a coder’s trophy case. Heart of palladium and

tantalum among the taxidermist’s shelves. The cryoliteeyes become playground marbles in games of keepsieswhere the runts learn to gamble. Maybe the other wing

also broke from body, is halfway up highway 27, carried aklick in the gutterwind the 191 makes. Or this: the secondwing sleeps in a street sweeper’s belly. For now, we have

one wing levitate in pulses of traffic’s breath. We can’t findthe rest of it. But it could only go so far without closedloops of the intact machine. Our blood-and-guts birds don’t

have mystery. They die in heaps at clean glass windows.They evolve pygostyles when tails impede flight. Lop offthat parson’s nose of cooked birds. Our birds learn tool use

and puzzles. Their feathers drop from high-voltage lines, freefrom forged deaths our created wings cling to. Don’t look,we say—then look. Recoil at their mess. Bionic pigeons spare

us roadkill. They leave us nothing. We are left searching fora lost piece. And maybe a crow perches on a doorknob, picks alock with an artificial ulna. Cracks the door and drops the key.

sparks to signal, It’s over. And maybe the rest of thefleshmachine is in the scrapheap, molted and sold per