Across the lot
I saw crows
three four
huddled picking at
something.
Their eyes turned on
me
sent shivers up my shins.
Their prize
a dove
wings peeled back
like a cartoon spinach can
whose fresh innards
now lived inside
crow bellies.

The blacktop
clean
not a drop of blood near
her discarded
feathery shell.
Her face
gone
eaten perhaps
or taken.
But her heart
smooth red
pointed as a spade
just inches away.

Birds
devouring
a bird felt
wrong
somehow outside norms
of predator and prey
or animal etiquette.
But are we so
dissimilar?

People
must become
things
in order to
make proper
use
of them.