Helen Vitoria
A bird by any other name
- after Woodstock
Maybe it’s because I was born Yellow,
like the first scent of Spring, on the belly of a dog,
an uneven song of questionable origin.
Maybe it’s the way I crash into things,
when flying upside down, & fake it.
Or, being named after a free love festival,
listening to Rock,
teaching myself how to dance.
So, I pretend to be free,
I know how to build my own nest,
express myself without saying a word,
deal with a beak-bleed
at high altitudes.
Fly crooked, & like it,
stop before a crash, catch myself & laugh.
Helen Vitoria lives and writes in Effort, PA. Her work can be found and is forthcoming in: PANK, wicked alice, The Orange Room Review, The Dirty Napkin, Gigantic Sequins, The Scrambler, The Cartier Street Review, Sunfish Poetry Magazine, Monkeybicycle, Tiger’s Eye: A Journal of Poetry, Spooky Boyfriend, Thirteen Myna Birds, Right Hand Pointing, The Literary Bohemian, The Literary Burlesque, Ginosko Literary Journal and others. She has been thrice nominated for Best New Poets 2010 Anthology. She is working on her first full length collection: Corn Exchange.
