Accessibility Text for ‘The Arrow Stork’: A diagonal black line bisects the page from lower left to upper right, passing through the third stanza. In the third stanza, the words 'maybe' on line one and 'a red hand' on line two are in bold and coloured red:

Its arrival in Rostock refuted Aristotle

and Ovid, as in lieu of wintering as barnacles

or some other species, Ciconia ciconia 

simply flew as far as Africa and not the moon

until halted by a hunter’s bolt. Imagine the Klützer’s

surprise at the spear piercing its throat, African mahogany

out at both ends, brown fletch acute to the stork’s white own,

the wound healed over in a diamond mound, feathery but pressed.

No blood, but maybe some was loosed by curious prods or pulls,

imparting a red hand to peasant or zoologist

as it was studied then stuffed for display (still to this day).

It was meant to be a miracle. There’ve been twenty-five since.

I come from a similar place. This stork denied transformation

but not being changed. It sat with the solid and the hollow held 

firm in its neck, swallowed and sang in resonance with the skewer

and lived. I listen to a stork’s call: guttural, rumbling, rapt 

like the smack of wooden shaft on stretched skin, and imagine it not

unlike the song of an adapted larynx that says ‘we’re coming’.