Why do you trade your flat, green rectangles for burnt bean water?

What do you see through the small windows you all carry in your pockets?

Most importantly; how do you survive the hulking metallic birds? Each day, thousands and thousands of you line up to be ingested by the things. Some fly away. Others land and empty out their contents – alive. This is strange to us. When we eat invertebrates, they are crushed in our beaks and crushed again in our gizzards.

Here, though, we eat discarded French fries by the hundreds. These are preferable to insects insomuch as their flavor is superior. However, we notice rotund bellies growing on us, as round as our eggs, safely tucked away in the rafters.

See? We have crafted our nest from luggage tag strings and the broken tines of black plastic forks. Four pink eggs await their hatching day. It is strange to think that this larger nest, built for your mammoth metal birds, will be the only home our young will know. Here, the trees are made of silk and plastic. The sky is a permanent arc of corrugated gray overhead. When it rains, we cannot smell the petrichor.

Still, they will not know want. They will not scavenge for the smallest seeds in winter. They will not know the December chill, how it settles in our hollow bones. They will enjoy long spans of life – five years or more – no kestrels, no grackles, no screech owls in sight.

And the view. Each evening, the sunset is framed by this four-story panorama of windows, where we watch your metal birds take flight, without flapping their wings, until one by one, they merge into the spacious orange.