Mudlark Flash No. 83 (2013)

Laura Sobbott Ross

Farmer Mails Peacock Eggs to Elizabeth Taylor

                                Overheard at the Post Office in Sorrento, Florida, 2010
She’d asked for eggs, bigger than her diamonds, her La Peregrina pearl. 
How did he intend to keep them warm crossing the country in that small 
crate? Fragile—a felt tipped velvet rope. When they’d broken through, 
those baby birds, would she watch them bloom, have the caretaker fetch
them kibble and leftover spring salads from her polished ebony bowls?
Their drab throats evolving into that particular hue too vivid to be called 
blue. Surely, the peacock cries at night would rouse the neighbors miles 
away, eclipse the Pacific breaking at distant bluffs. When the impulse to 
arc and strut splayed itself at last in a labyrinth of soft orbs, lapping green 
to bronze to teal at the iris-like center, she’d wonder in her double row of 
lashes and her housecoat at those birds; their sudden applause—a curtain 
of heavy plumes sweeping open, a thousand starry eyes thrown wide.

Laura Sobbott Ross’s poetry can be found in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Florida Review, Columbia Review, Calyx, Natural Bridge, Tar River Poetry, Cold Mountain Review, and many other places. Her chapbook, A Tiny Hunger, is from Yellow Jacket Press.

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