Birds in Captivity I

POETRY

by Svetlana Litvinchuk

I was once a small child living on the top
floor of a brutalist apartment building—

the top being the least desirable, thirteen
flights of stairs a part of the package.

A Kyiv studio apartment shared by three people
it was hardly the urban penthouse suite,

yet luxuriously spacious by the standards
of the old kommunalka apartments. The front

door connected to the singular room by a solitary
hallway lined with puffed brown leather, easily

destroyed by cats. We had a neighbor whom
I thought very wealthy for he had a lot of birds,

though, this was a time when there was no such thing
as wealth. In his apartment where the birds were kept—

there were dozens maybe, hundreds—I know not how many,
everything is a lot to a small child; anything was

a lot in the Soviet era—but in his one studio
he collected them the way one does stamps and he

displayed them the way one does bills—
on his dining table, precariously, stacked atop

one another. He must have sold us a pair,
because one day in my memory there appeared

Roma and Chica in their bent cage inside our own studio
apartment, on a side table right in the middle of

the room, next to the television that lived in its cabinet,
inside which were preciously three black and white channels

and zero commercials. Roma and Chica,
whom I called my beloved love birds, though they were

in every way parakeets, were the best kind of
feel-good entertainment—a living, breathing

love story. As the sound of my parents’ fighting
thundered against the thin partition of the kitchen

I knew they loved each other very much.

The bent wires of the cage were stuffed with cardboard
so that they could not do as birds do and fly

away, but that must have been exactly what Chica did
because one day I looked in the cage to find only Roma.

Here there was a cage and over there there was a forest,
between them a balcony with floor to ceiling glass

each apartment the same configuration in our neatly
lined row of buildings looking upon a neatly

lined row of trees, like a reflection. Roma grew quite
sad without Chica—

despondent.

He ceased to sing, and then to eat,
until one day, he was gone, too.

It was a love story.

For in my mind he waited for his moment to
sneak through the prison bars and the balcony

wall of glass that stood between him and his true
love and there when he reached the other side

because his wings remembered how, he was
reunited with his lover once more

for eternity.