Birds of Paradise

Leah Browning

In the months since I’ve seen him,

he’s grown a full beard and had his hair

cut in a different style, so when he materializes

outside the mechanized glass doors

barricading the secured area of the airport

in a brown corduroy trucker jacket

with a faux-sheepskin lining,

it takes me a moment to recognize him

amongst the other passengers flowing

past me on the way toward the baggage claim.

He is no longer my son in that moment

but a man I don’t know, a stranger,

striding toward me as anyone might,

as if our relationship up to this point

has been erased from both our memories

and we are two tenderhearted adults meeting

for the first time and falling unexpectedly

into a kind of love, and so I embrace and take him

home with me, the car sailing through the dark past

the landscape of palm trees and unseasonable flowers.

 
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Leah Browning is the author of three nonfiction books and six chapbooks of poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in Poetry South, The Stillwater Review, Belletrist, Mojave River Review, The Forge Literary Magazine, Four Way Review, The Threepenny Review, Valparaiso Fiction Review, Watershed Review, Newfound, Random Sample Review, Superstition Review, Santa Ana River Review, The Homestead Review, and elsewhere.