Poultry

I am the dead chicken. Of course I am dead. Of course I can still see. I know the kitchen. I have been here before. Thousands of times. Millions. I have been in primeval kitchens, ones made of rocks in caves, crevasses in sands, castles and tents. I am cooked over and over again. I am eaten. Swallowed. Pushed and torn, my molecules pulled apart, my sinews and bones bolster my organs, my sinew and bone to your sinew and bone.
They cut me in all places.
Every part to its purpose. Delicately they extract my bones. They roll my flesh, my meat. They stuff it and tie it. They keep one hole and fill my empty self with foods with lemons and onions with thyme and rosemary. My traveling companions, my supporting staff, my supporting cast, my co-actors, we go to our fates together. And return and return. A cycle like an engine starting, running, stopping. We are the feeders.

Home Fires

As soon as she gets into her apartment, before she turns on a light, she moves with fast, wide steps to the other end of the living room. The terrace door lets in light from a sky fading from pink to gray. She presses the message button on her machine. A man’s accented voice says slowly, plaintively…
I love you.
Where are you?
It’s Enrique. Enrique’s deep, slow voice, a voice that reminds Bettina of thickening smoke. She’s heard this message before, she’s heard it every day for the last 8 months. It is only one message, an old message, one that she keeps, one that she listens to daily as if new, one that is waiting for a matching message, a newer one from Enrique. But she’s heard nothing new from him. He seems caught in a soundless place, muffled by a big world, so absorbed in something else that no words can get through to her.

Bird Land

She sat near on a limb near the top of the tulip tree. Her thigh muscles clinging hard to the branch, her arms stretched upward, her hands clasping the branch above her head. She spoke rapidly and intensely as if in urgent prayer. But she was not alone in the tree. She spoke to someone else.
A catbird perched on a branch in front of her. She kept her eyes steady on the bird’s smooth gray feathers and dark black cap. Its shiny black eyes that looked up at hers, attentive and listening.
Bettina had always wanted to live in the trees. She’d watch flocks of sparrows settle in for night in a maple or cottonwood. Their voices bantering all at once. She wished she could be in their society. Wished they would let her in and accept her within their tree. She knew her size would not work for that. So she wished she could actually be one of them.
The catbird who listened to her now had gotten used to her monologues and probably listened more out of politeness than wanting to hear. Because Bettina almost always talked about the same things. She always told him her most ardent wishes. Her fascination with the past. Not her past, but farther back, the past of the human, the past before the human created farms and tamed some animals. The past before the humans left the forest and the savannas. And she spoke of Enrique. She could never be sure if she’d ever see him again.
The catbird listened. Half listened. He knew the old stories. This human who was not happy with her own kind. Or her own time. It made him suspect that the large head this human creature had caused her pain in ways he will never understand. He sensed too that it didn’t matter if he didn’t know what to do with her confessions. She just wanted to say them. But today, on this day, a foreign thought came into the bird’s brain. Something he had never seen before. Words that made shapes in his head. As if her confessions had taught him to understand what is human. His thought was clear and singular. It had one message. A message that Bettina may want to hear, because it was about her.
Bettina spoke to the bird in a kind of fit or trance. But she knew who she was talking to. She spoke to many animals but not all of them stood still enough to hear. She hoped by telling the catbird her dreams and worries she could somehow break through and be understood. To hear answers without sound. To feel feathers against her cheek even as the bird stood still before her
She paused in her speech.
The bird flicked its head up and down. It jumped and turned on the branch giving Bettina his back. Then jumped and turned again to face her. He opened his beak and squawked his call, the sound of a cat whining. Bettina watched him sensing something coming for her. He was quiet for a moment and then a long trill of music came from him. A high pitched looping tune unlike anything a catbird had ever said before.
Bettina’s eyes widened. She felt her brain twisting and bending trying to fit this song into something she could understand.  Mashing it between cerebral folds, forcing it to be accepted, to work through her system to come out as something known.
The catbird repeated the trill. And then again. And then again. And then Bettina dropped her head, her eyes closed, her brain knowing something now. The bird became silent. She lifted her head and opened her tearful eyes and nodded to him. He meowed and then looked down and dropped off the tree branch, taking flight into the shrubbery, disappearing into the ground cover.
“I’ll go. I know it’s time to go.”
This time she spoke to the tree. There is no way of knowing if a tree is listening. It has so much it must hear. In one swift motion Bettina jumped down landing on the ground with a sure thump of her feet. And then stood up on the ground as erect as a good human can be.

We Need Some More Kindling

Through the night. Even when the planets are out. Saturn and Venus. We still need more kindling. Is that an airplane flashing a headlight against the black? Or a moving star coming closer, daring to steal a better look…?

Stalactite Drips in the Kitchen

A chronic drip. Right over the marble work table, just above Franny’s head, but curiously not dripping on her. Just dripping when she steps away. It’s only a leak. A leak into this basement kitchen. This subterranean labyrinth right in the middle of the city where Bettina (known by a more colorful name) keeps the flames in the hearth burning. Franny is only an intern but already she’s lost. The drip unnerves her, but her boss, her leader, the one with the burning eyes and the flying red hair, likes it. She depends on the drip. She’s growing it into a stalactite. Part of the transformation when the kitchen becomes a cave and her cooking becomes as old as the first glimpse of fire.

In the middle of the garden

She kept her eye on the snails. They swarmed quietly, not aware, sluicing and gluing across the pavement, across the bark. Sightless eyes stretching, not knowing.
She had her basket ready. She had her milk in a pot on the marble table. She had her mouth watering. She saw the old cave and she heard the old breath of an ancient snail.
One shell lodged under a broken Roman column. One snail shell once stepped on by old Roman feet. By unknowing sandals. Crushing the spiraling color, the chewy slug inside.
In this day, in this time, they are back and she is waiting to re-capture them.
They are not waiting. They know nothing about history.