Читать книгу Tula - Chris Santiago - Страница 11

The Poet’s Mother at Eleven, Killing a Chicken

As for the bird, its pedigree

was impeccable: rose-combed & indigenous

cockfighting in its blood. My grandfather had folded

its ancestor under his arm

in a bolt of jute & the boxcar dark. He was young

& bound for the provinces, fleeing

with his bride the rifled

capital, the Arisaka Type 99, its stock

chrysanthemum-stamped, the blade

jabbed half-jokingly into my grandmother’s

stomach: swollen the private thought

not with limbs but a stash.

Dowry; doubloons; maybe

even meat. In the clatter & sway

the hen held its tongue, producing

eggs but no epiphanies

although the flesh of its forebears had delighted

the palates of missionaries, good-

intentioned Baptists in the wake of cholera

& reconcentration: nation builders; tenderfoots;

virgins still wet with honeysuckle & whitewash.

Who brought among other things home

economics, so that fifty years later my mother

would have to corner

& seize it. Wring its wattled links.

Pluck it & gut it & waste

nothing.