Bluebird.

Sanctuary: bathroom locked, skeleton key in one hand, works in the other, she contemplated flushing her fix, the toilet bowl redemptive as a cathedral's font. She remembered her fingers landing, swan-like, on holy water. God bless the child whose tears are lullabies.

First blood. Raped by a neighbor, she scrubbed stained linens as if they were marble steps and her fingers, boar bristles. Eyes smarting from Clorox fumes, she scoured until her palms were raw and the tattered sheet, tinged brown. Her mama beat her anyhow.

Branded wayward by the court. Stretching a rubber strap, she tensed when it snapped against her palm. How numb she had become. Four cloistered years, inside iron gates, behind the confessional's trefoil screen, she learned only that she was unworthy. Daydreaming in the belfry, she caught

glints of sunlight in rosary beads, rainbows darting across cracked plaster as she whispered Hail Marys. At mass, when the sisters chanted "De Profundis," she hummed a blues-baby's lament. In votive candles' amber glow, she prayed for home. "Gloomy Sunday" all week long. Her voice trailed off

somewhere she could not revisit. The convent crept back as cops read her the writ. Keys dangled from starched habits as nuns' footsteps echoed down dim halls. Handcuffs clashed with rhinestones, so she draped her wrists with a mink stole.

Her bare shoulders shivered. When she clapped the drafty window, pane clattering

in the sash, a chilling arpeggio ran through her. Not since prison matrons frisked her, their fingers probing sacred rooms, had she suffered such intrusive cold. Arms wrapped as if strait-jacketed, she studied the stark mosaic, black and white tiles shifting as the bathroom closed in.

One hand on the tank, the other clutching a glassine bag, she imagined the water turning crimson, backing up the toilet like blood in a syringe. She slammed the lid, perched on the commode. Last supper. Bruised gardenias quavered to the floor. In the soundproof cage where the songbird cried, the blues ran cold and deep.

Carole Boston Weatherford is the author of the poetry chapbook The Tan Chartreuse and Juneteenth Jamboree, the first children's book about the emancipation holiday. She has won both a North Carolina Arts Council Writers Fellowship and the Furious Flower Poetry Prize. A Baltimore native, she currently resides in High Point, North Carolina.