My mother laughs when I ask

where she took her mother’s

just-plucked chicken to be declared kosher—

oh he was just a neighbor across the street,

nothing special, I really don’t remember.

Her stories belie secret wounds.

Why, before cooking dinner, did my Bobbie

wrap the just-plucked bird in newspaper

and ask her daughter to trot

around sooty tenements of Montreal

to ask whether it could be eaten?

I ask about the pronouncement

spoken by this person, wizened

in my imagination, a man like a toothpick

sprouting legs and arms,

gesticulating in his run-down room

over a salmonella-breeding hunk of flesh.

If there was blood, if the egg remained

stuck in its cavity…if the pipicle…

Where superstitions gather there is danger.

I remember the foyer, where, forced

to enter, we endured the spittle of a gnome,

our Bubba, a neutered woman

who laughed and waltzed and cried.

Lost all his teeth by the age of forty,

according to legend. Chased his wife

around with a kitchen knife

As memory searches the gray banks

it takes down the patriarchy.

It was she who chased him—Bubba,

the educated woman of Poland—

a rarity, a blemish on his conscience

as he praised with his sweet voice

the feminine idol who existed nowhere

in the flatlands, to whom

he returned each evening.

The charred roast still in the oven,

no one minding the children,

and Bubba upstairs reading

Agatha Christies in five languages.

Firing the house cleaner who stole

silver from the humble house,

offering favoritism to her last born son,

the only skinny one, for dessert.

I see my father, the weakling

teased for his name, his glasses.

Oscar four eyes.  I see the pen

he wrapped in newspaper

to give as a gift to a friend.

Theirs an arranged marriage—

she couldn’t cook or clean nor receive

guests who came for counsel,

solace, to celebrate high holidays.

His voice still projects to the back

of the small Winnipeg synagogue

where he, the holy man, lives

to yodel, albeit humbly,

the blessings of his single god,

Creator of the Universe, Amen.

At three weeks you look to the right, doe eyes

searching for voices, the composition

of rooms and persons who attend your cries.

Come from what kingdom, bloodily born,

we fawn over you in swaddled form.

Bundled jingle-jangle, nerve and synapse.

The fontanel, the weak neck, our alarm

over its rubbery dance of demise.

Days and night blur at your entrance stage left.

Parents sleep-deprived, you the new game

more difficult than Zelda or Pokémon.

We’re already anchored by the small heft,

the rubric of its smiling tell—come

to conquer courtship, according to plan.

My hunger is an egg laid

each morning on the sideboard—

sometimes blue as a robin’s

often green or tan.

Bears claw their way into the coop,

tearing wire until dawn

shines on chickenshit,

and the matronly white bird

can be excised.

A bad word could come

from either sex.

Womankind’s not nephritic,

rather androgynous.

Whether I’m the victim

or the perpetrator of heinous acts,

still the stomach

collapses like a lung

after howling

for what it needs.

Frequent the cherry table

polished to a gleam.

Learn through mistreatment

it is there

you are most likely to be fed.