|
CHICKEN FOR COMPANY
My father opens the cardboard box,
and onto linoleum pour a dozen
yellow fluffs with beaks and scaly feet.
Linoleum painted gray as spring
before Easter, paint-speckled like an egg.
Chicks in a makeshift pen
by the wood-burning kitchen stove.
Grown chickens in the coop. Beware
the rooster. Eggs warm as chick-fluff
for breakfast. My mother plucks headless
hens in the sink, pulls out intestines,
liver, gizzard. Chicken for Sunday
dinner. Company’s coming,
chicken divan with asparagus.
I join the hens, climb on top
of their roost. Draw pictures as if
I could fly away.
Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada,
and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects.
Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry
International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology
California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book,
The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.
Email: Taylor Graham
Return to Table of Contents
|
