subject: The Girl Who Taught A Chicken To Walk Backwards [print this page] Mostly she loved hens whose necks grew Mostly she loved hens whose necks grew
too long, curved like gourds, crooked combs
that toppled over the side of their docile heads.
At school when she was bored she stared
at the boy with the wrecked chest, whispered
in his spoon-shaped ears that it was easy to catch
a hen and teach it to walk backwards, strutting,
even dancing with an oblong gait. After the boy's
grandpap ran over his leg, drunk and backing down
the drive, he walked with crutches, later with a limp.
In Ripley's she'd read of a rooster who lived
thirty days with its head cut clean off. She told him
she worried about that chicken's sorrow, its grief
at not being able to peck. She supposed the boy
had to hide his secrets, like a hatchet's head buried
in a stump. Eventually all birds were beheaded:
the family's cook grabbing the flightless bodies,
thrusting them into boiling water, then plucking,
plucking, plucking. Whenever the boy tried to speak
it sounded like a hen's clucking beneath his peach
moustache, which was the same color as the sky
at dawn when she coaxed her hens with meal,
even molasses. Instead of letting the birds aimlessly
scratch, she'd shove her hands into apron pockets,
thrust her head forward, and march straight
as a newly plowed furrow, her stride narrow
as the path to heaven. Upon her approach
what chicken wouldn't take a step back?
The day the news crew arrived to film the bird
the boy came riding on his bike: hair standing up
like wind in a coxcomb, sternum like a chicken's
breast sticking out from under his white-pressed shirt.
She took his hand because she already understood
at some point we must take a step backwards
to see whether we're frying in the fat of our sins,
or whether love, when we try to own it, must become
