In the Artist’s Words
There are parrots in Brooklyn. Roosting in trees, building nests and eating the occasional slice of pizza. They are the descendants of birds that escaped shipping crates or were abandoned by their owners. They are bright and loud and Brooklyn is their home even if this is not where the first egg of their kind was laid. If you’re very lucky, you can look up and find one peering bright-eyed from a telephone line. When school lets out for the day they watch the crowds of people get on and off the trains on the elevated lines. Murmurations of young girls almost-women, loud with laughter or anger or joy or something else entirely, whispering and screaming home languages and baby patois. Sometimes a gangly-beautiful child catches a green feather on the breeze, puts it between the pages of their thirty-second-hand textbook and thinks of all the roads, trains, waters, planes that brought them here. To Brooklyn.
About the Artist:
Marika Bailey is an Afro-Caribbean author and illustrator. Her fiction has previously appeared in FIYAH Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Apparitions Lit, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Strange Horizons. You can find her online on her website, www.commanderrika.com, or on Twitter as @Marika_Writes_. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and the softest cat in the world.