By Lauren Crawford 

I was born with one foot kicking the sky away.

Angry and stupid, I thought I could do it, too. Tuck myself

back into the chalk-white thimble Mother Hen gave me.

 

First day we began the basics. The pecking order,

and my place in it. You do not fight the cock

unless you’re ready for him to bend you over.

 

We have rights. We have weapons; a beak, talons and wings.

But they are of little use here, except to scratch at

the hay, the beetle and the maize. For now, we are free range

because we behave. We do not question the hand

that feeds, that which keeps us protected from the foxes.

 

We do not wander beyond the borders of our master’s land,

lest we be raised in cages wing-to-wing. The hens and cocks

who are wild always get eaten by predators. Here we are safe.

Here we are comfortable. We have an order to our lives:

 

Scratch, peck, cluck, lay. Scratch, peck, cluck, lay.

The things we need to live are earned by our eggs,

Mother Hen tells me. When a hen stops laying,

she disappears. We are workers. We are not cats.

 

We are not horses. We are not kings or men or gods.

We do not get creative with the system we are taught.

We are someone’s money, someone’s property,

someone’s ambition, someone’s time and effort.

 

In ancient Egypt, the goddess Isis was often depicted

with the head of a chicken. If I listen and worship,

she will teach me the secrets of a nurturing mother.

We serve guests with our breasts, give wishes with our bones.

 

Our feathers can soften a human into sleep. Our liver spreads

easily on bread, our feet simmer best with salt. Our feet? I ask.

Oh yes, Mother Hen says. They get a kick out of it.

We feed them from our body, let them discard our souls

wherever. But we are told a massive gate of gold awaits

 

us faithful laying hens somewhere far into the beyond,

where we run and scratch and play, just as we did before,

but this time we lay for no reason at all, and we do not say goodbye.

Goodbye to what? I ask. But she’s already back to her pecking.

Lauren Crawford holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. A native of Houston, Texas, she is the recipient of the 2023 Willie Morris Award, a finalist for the 2024 Rash Award, third place winner of the 2024 Connecticut Poetry Award, and the second place winner of the 2020 Louisiana State Poetry Society Award. Her debut collection, Catch & Release, is forthcoming in 2025 with Cornerstone Press as part of the University of Wisconsin’s Portage Poetry Series. Her poetry has either appeared or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, Passengers Journal, The Appalachian Review, Prime Number Magazine, SoFloPoJo, The Florida Review, Red Ogre Review, Ponder Review, The Midwest Quarterly, THIMBLE, The Worcester Review, The Spectacle and elsewhere. Lauren currently teaches writing at the University of New Haven and serves on the editorial teams of Iron Oak Editions, Palette Poetry, and Alan Squire Publishing Bulletin. Connect with her on Twitter @LaurenCraw4d.