Like a Bird
I preen my feathers in rainwater
puddles against the curb
dirt velvet, cool droplets
mixed with gravel and piss, I make
myself beautiful and
waddle through the bodies
going to work, to school, roving
and eating ripe, seeded fruit
forever etched in my mind as
never having a place
more important to arrive
than one’s lips
at the meaty neck of a mango.
*
I have shit on every park bench
between Brooklyn
and Fayetteville
meta-phonetically delicious economies
every city is a memorial
every street, a line of demarcation
yet, I was not taught to name this land.
*
After I have burgled
a gutter French fry,
a last bite of a hot dog and bun,
strings of sauerkraut
draping the cold meat
listlessly
I find new cities
and new things to eat.
I do it for my fans
the oblong street watchers
with their time, dried bread &
jealous crow’s feet
I watch, too, pecking feathers from their shafts.
Shakeema Smalls is a poet and developmental editor from Georgetown, South Carolina. Her work has been widely published in outlets such as Honey Literary, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Emergent Literary, Tidal Basin Review, Root Work Journal, Radius Lit, Free Black Space, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fruit Journal, and Foglifter, among others. She is an alum of the Tin House Workshop, the Obsidian Foundation, and VONA. She was a 2022 PEN Emerging Voices Fellow and served as the inaugural Markus D. Manley Poet-in-Residence at The Poetry Lab in 2024. She was recently named a 2025 SouthArts South Carolina Literary Fellow. Her debut poetry collection, Sweetwater Mass, is forthcoming from Blair Publisher in January 2027.
