The volcanic red rim erupting around a chicken’s eye, have you noticed it? I wish the neighbor would. His name is Mike. He hates the chickens roosting in the backyard I
share with a loquat tree. I call the chickens Tank and Hermione (because it is cumbersome to
keep yelling here Gallus gallus dometicus.) Mike is not bothered by Hermione, but has an irrational distrust of Tank. Tank is a student of Houdini. I cannot prove it, but I’ve seen magical instructions carved into loquat seeds and tiny receipts for escape kits
etched into egg yolks. It is 6:am on a Sunday morning. Mike knocks at the front door. He is
lucky I do not sleep with a gun or a Samurai sword or a grenade (I don’t, because I do not know
how to acquire weapons. Plus, unlike some of my countrymen, I have pledged my life to
civility.) When I open the door, Mike says, your chicken is in my yard. It is 6:am on a Sunday! And Mike has yanked me brutally from a kaleidoscopic dream of multidimensional
Rosicrucian time travel.So I ask, what color is the chicken, Mike? Mike says, I don’t know…tan.
I say, Mike! I don’t have a tan chicken. Tan is the interior ruin of a sleeping mind. The chicken is
burnt umber. The chicken that lives with me, Tank, is feathered in gradations of gold offset by a
brown, no, a sienna that shivers from certain river rocks and sets in motion a fluttering vibrato of shadow and mud. The chicken has no papers (except maybe the Houdini files.) No last name.
If she ever needs one she can peck one out of hat. But Mike just keeps saying, over and over, like
an alarm clock made of rancid, ideologically animated worm meal, your chicken is in my yard. As if the chicken, with her feet descended from dinosaurs, could ever really be mine As if the yard, made of billion year old earth, could ever really be his.
