Next week, when the fisherman pulls the dead albatross off the hook, he will note her dull eyes and long slender wings hanging limp. He will jot down the number on the metal band circling the bird’s leg and report it, triggering a rescue mission for the bird’s surviving chick, waiting on a nest some 2,400 miles away.
But, today, she tilts her white-feathered head to the sleeping ball of down between her legs, gently preening with the tip of her four-inch-long serrated bill. Then, she steps off the nest and runs, heading into the wind, her six-and-a-half-foot wings outstretched, air tickling her flight feathers, welcoming her into its embrace. She heads north to nutritious cold water for fish and squid to feed her babe, riding the roller coaster of waves, up and over, up and over, recycling air into energy, clicking off latitudes at 45 miles per hour. She is called the grandest living flying machine on earth.
This poem first appeared in Cheap Pop.
—
Kim Steutermann Rogers lives in Hawaii. Her chapbook Denatured: Stories of Change will publish in June 2025 from Emerge Literary Journal. Her science journalism has published in National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Audubon and prose, recently, in Ghost Parachute, and Gooseberry Pie Lit Magazine. Kim’s work has been nominated for Pushcart Prize, Best Microfiction, Best Small Fiction, and Best of the Net honors. She’s been awarded residencies at Storyknife Writers Retreat and at Dorland Mountain Arts.
