Tula. Chris Santiago

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       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.