Eileen Winn

At that age, hatching our own chickens seemed like a good idea

and the optimism in my brotherish
sibling’s science meant
they had a plan: we’d raise the chickens
with the same deliberate glee

that we gathered in our bodies when we split
ticks like goatskins of wine, bloated sacks
plucked from canine hide and ruined in purple swaths
staining my aunt’s concrete driveway. We’d raise chickens

with that same curious confidence that we split those bugs full
of dog blood, that hot & dogged breath bottled up in a body
then broken in the light of our cruel and tender faces.

My kindred brother put eggs under anything safe: their hands,
their laced-up sneakers. They watched over
their new nests with scientific devotion, the same loyalty
we brought to smearing lightning
bugs on the grass, baby arsonists

kindly spreading flying fire slick and chemical along the chlorophyll fingers
making up this manicured lawn, our body-mashing destruction
still a thousand times more sparkly than church-lit golden vigils.

We’d see those chickens off to a bright future, shiny hope
like one long unending flint to flash suspending stuff
bright as smiles against death curled in the grass.

How hard could it be to have chickens, they said, to believe
that even shell-bound babies grow wings.

and I was old enough to tell them no
but I was young enough to be thwarted
every time I settled for a nap and maybe
young enough to believe that even useless wings
might break a body free—

And while I slept:
And while my mother slept:

my opal-fingered almost-brother slipped
a supermarket’s Fabergé
deep into the pockets of a child’s velvet dress,
tucked eggs pale as a milk tooth
under throw, cushion. An egg
for every soft & dark place, an egg
pressed into the ghost
toes of my father’s empty shoes.

They had plans for the eggs to get warm, for our house
to get warmer, our rooms
to be filled with tiny yellow
feathered chirps of joy: What better dream
for a tiny child to sleep to? To think of waking
in the midst of cheeping flames: what hearth
would not be warmer for a hen?

But my yolk-footed father glowered first
at his sun-dipped toes & cracked up sole and second
on this unruly scientist, small never-farmer,
wild-haired for a chick’s salvation—he raised
his voice all at once like a barn.

He felted his frown like a nest
around the breakfast they killed & knit
his brow over ruined groceries
until he could not see our hope.

All this to say: there is a tiny pocket of air inside every egg
that turns poison when it’s time to hatch.
If a chick waits to break the shell
until their breath is gone, they’ve got no
strength to do it.

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Eileen Winn is an agender poet working on their MFA at Florida Atlantic University while also editing at Swamp Ape Review and Alien Lit Mag. You can find their work at Purpled Palm Press in the Breakup Book, bone & ink press and elsewhere. Without purple pens, much of their work would not exist.