Grief III
I pull the chicken meat from the bones, cube the meat,
boil the bones to broth. I try not to think about our sixteen laying hens.
How we called them by old-fashioned, feminine names.
How we praised them every time we pulled a shit-sticky egg
from under one of their feathery bums. It wasn’t until I saw
the internal organs of a dissected bird—all those eggs clustered
and glistening like resin grapes—that I considered how a hen
has every egg she will ever lay inside her all at once. Before that,
I’m not sure what I thought. In high school I learned
that at 20 weeks a female fetus has already developed
its reproductive system, replete with millions of ova. I was always
within my mother. Even before she was born. My daughter was always
within me. I can't believe I don't get to live in a matriarchy.
When I failed to protect our hens against the young raccoons that would
strike in broad daylight from beneath the burdock’s splayed leaves,
we brought home five ducks—three magpies and two runners.
I named one of them Suzy Quatro because she was so cool.
Mottled black like a well-worn biker jacket. Long and lean. She
was my first mercy killing after a coyote left a gash in her neck.
Now my heart might seem hard when I tell you
I even once brought my daughter to slaughter meat birds
in my neighbor’s backyard because I thought she should know
how much food really costs. Thirty chickens in all, fattened for three months.
Each of them, good-natured and unsuspecting. Their healthy feathers
gleamed like church glass in the sunshine. After all that bloody work
we ended up giving the meat away. I couldn’t get her to eat chicken
for a year. To think, ever since I was a fetus in the womb, I have been
dragging my daughter through it. Like that time I made her help me
bathe my mother because I hadn’t seen her naked since I was a child
and I was afraid to be alone with her modesty and her pride. So my daughter
helped me guide my mother’s bare backside onto a metal chair
beneath the showerhead. My mother—as vulnerable as any plucked thing.
We scrubbed at her until she disappeared and it was just me
and my daughter in that room, sudsing the disembodied expanse
of a rosy thigh, back, breast, armpit as water poured out over the tile,
my daughter and I—laughing so hard as she confessed that one day
she intends to put me in one of the nicest old folks’ homes in the city.
