By Barbara Edelman

A swallow nested in an alcove in an open hallway outside my studio, twenty summers ago at a writing residency. I stood at a distance on tiptoe to see the brown-speckled eggs. Later, I heard cheeping, which grew louder by the day, and I’d sometimes watch the mother swoop through the archway into the nest with worms in her beak.

“Same spot every year,” said Cora, when she dropped off lunch.

At the skinless, bubble-eye stage that makes you think they cracked out too soon, you can love the hatchlings out of pity. But when their yellow mouths open like grotesque flowers, stretching bigger than the chicks’ heads, cheeping feed me, feed me, machinelike, four of them, you wonder what the mother feels.

Three chicks got big and one of them fledged, and later two more, but the runt didn’t fledge and it cheeped and cheeped, and the mother didn’t return, and the cheeps got weaker and became squeaks which grew fainter and farther apart, and the mother didn’t return.

You might expect to hear I brought the nest into my studio and fed the chick with an eyedropper. I didn’t. I fled on my bike despite the local farm dogs trained to drive cyclists into traffic.

I passed the swallow and her three fledglings, perched on a nearby fence, and I hated them, I wanted a hawk to get them or a cat or someone with a gun.

When I returned, the squeaks were no longer audible. Then Cora, in her rounds to the studios, cleared out the nest with its tiny corpse, and she smiled—kindly, I think—at my extravagant anguish.

Barbara Edelman’s poetry collections include All the Hanging Wrenches and Dream of the Gone-From City from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and the chapbooks Exposure and A Girl in Water. Her poems and prose have appeared in Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Arts & Letters, and other journals. She’s a teaching professor emerita in English at the University of Pittsburgh.