I began writing the poem in 2021, a year after my father’s death, and a year before I began my medical transition. The poem was meant to remain as a relic from a period in my life I wasn’t comfortable with recording in any other way. It could only be detailed through the voice of another person, a child, a shadow of myself from years past cast onto the present. A part of me, however unintentional, was infused into the poem, and it took on a life of its own. The red bird was formed in part when I was still a child, already aware of what it means to possess an innate difference in the way I experienced and interacted with the world. The boy was formed even before.
When I was around eight or nine, my parents brought two pairs of birds home. I had never wanted to have birds as pets, but my parents weren’t aware of that, and since I had pestered my parents for a pet, they bought the four birds from a local pet shop. It was from the insistence of my father that resulted in the choice of four birds and two betta fish. As a child, I rarely thought of birds in captivity, and I was consumed by the notion that flying was the closest thing to freedom one could ever get. Having the ability to disappear entirely from the ground, even if only for fleeting moments, was particularly enticing.
In the days since bringing the birds home, I developed a notion that the birds had to leave the cage, and despite my initial disinterest, I grew fond of the birds soon after their arrival. They were allowed to leave the cage and roam the house when my parents were at home. I attempted to train the parrots, but I was impatient and undetermined, and I had already surrendered to the birds’ inevitable departure or eventual escape.
I had believed that any entrapment of a bird’s ability to fly was always temporary, as long as the bird remained uninjured, that they would always find a way to return to the sky in some capacity. The possibility of eternal captivity eluded me until I was faced with four birds looking at me through the bars of a cage, perched atop a piece of metal, its existence experienced entirely in captivity. These birds, I realized, had never had the chance to exist in a world that wasn’t concealed behind steel bars, and they might not even remember or understand freedom. The birds, if released into the wild, might not even survive. Their existence was experienced entirely through what could be seen from within the cage. I realized escape from captivity wasn’t always a guaranteed outcome, and as much as books and movies had me believe in the inevitability of an escape, I knew such a certainty did not exist.
As I watched the birds inside that cage, I began to view captivity in a profoundly different manner, their wings still large enough to sustain flight, unclipped, and yet any opportunity to escape did not guarantee freedom or ability to survive in the wild. The isolation of being trapped seemed worse than the loss of free movement. I viewed the captivity I felt in my own body differently as well. Their isolation felt reminiscent of my own confinement in a body I couldn’t yet understand. I imposed, unintentionally, my own feelings of desolation onto the caged birds. Although I could never know what they must have felt inside that cage, I felt kinship with the confined beings, and it allowed me an opportunity to understand myself.
It was around this time that I began reading more poetry at the library, and formed a vague and child-like idea of freedom that I had tied to my own oppressive captivity in a body that felt alien to me. In an attempt to make myself human, to feel some sense of a lurking freedom in a faraway future, I began to reshape my feelings into ideas I could capture from around me. I could see myself as a bird inside a cage, a mind unable to withhold the entrapment of an unchanging body. That was when the red bird was formed, although it wasn’t a red bird then, and it had no real story attached to its existence.
Although I no longer had to view my experience in fragments, I wanted to write about it from the perspective of a child that wasn’t allowed to have a childhood. When the birds finally escaped, I was not the one who had left the cage unlocked. Still, I watched the sky waiting for a glimpse of the birds from outside my house, the cage left on the ground beside me, open.
Mrityunjay Mohan is a queer, trans, writer of color. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The Indianapolis Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Fourteen Hills. He’s a Tin House scholar, Lambda Literary fellow, and a Brooklyn Poets fellow. He was a recipient of the Nella Larsen Memorial Scholarship for the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference.
