Associate Editor Connor Yeck: Kelsey Zimmerman’s “Convergent Evolution” is a poem of experiences echoed across many spaces: the animal and the familial, the vividly displayed and the hidden away. Framed by a fascination with the killdeer—a species of bird that feigns injury to save its young—our speaker unravels their own natural history and acknowledges the ways one adapts to environments that might transform from safety to danger in an instant.
To hear Kelsey read her work, click below.
Convergent Evolution
This morning keening killdeer rent the air outside the building where I work. Killdeer are perhaps my favorite bird, evolution baking into them a trick, burnt umber under the wing that they fan out upon detection, attention, or aggression, and drag in a piteous display (Help me, help me // kill me, kill me), drawing predators away from their nests—which are more like shallow bowls in the ground, littering gravel parking lots, the burrows of plowed fields in spring, rocky shores, and even rooftops. I’ve seen them, with their brilliant black-and-white speckled eggs, in the lot of an old landfill, at the far edge of an abandoned power plant. I like forgotten places too, and the feint, the sly redirection, always shouting LOOK AT THIS ATROCITY instead of What a lonely person I am. Or consider the devastation of my family, its brokenness, my tender injured wing leading away from my own nest, Don’t look, don’t look, come this way. I’m a very good daughter. Killdeer are very good mothers. Even without a nest, they use the broken-wing tactic to distract. Such is the methodology, the fine grain of their DNA. What does that to a creature. Sentences it away. Embeds the performance (my smile, my smile, always smiling). When I was a child, I would break things, insult, start baking brownies during the middle of the day—anything to turn my parents against me instead of each other, anything to turn the hunt in my direction.
Kelsey Zimmerman is a writer from Michigan currently living in Iowa. A 2021 Best of the Net nominee, her work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Longreads, Hobart, and Michigan Quarterly Review. You can find her on the web at www.kelseyzimmerman.com.
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