1) If you want to kill a chicken, move quickly. Choose a plump, healthy-looking bird. With both hands,
grab your hen around the neck and hold firmly.
2) Beat her neck against some object until you feel the bones break. Your goal here is to break the neck
quickly so she doesn’t suffer.
Dear friend,
i’m writing this very quickly; I’m writing you this letter very quickly because Mom is yelling
over the sound of burning firewood
her voice sparks
as the chickens
(the ones who wait)
invariably await their turn:
after all
going to the front is always a triumphant act,
a death
standing up without licking one’s wounds,
without swallowing persistent hairs
or feathers
that catch on the tongue like lies.
August 11, 1951
colon: colon, dear one,
the game was called blind hen[1]
let me tell you about it
(i know what I’m talking about)
because chickens never look into the bonfire;
rather, they gaze toward the horizon,
they also stretch
their necks as if the sun were a grain
of god
a tiny trace of lightening
like looking in the direction of a curved future
in an 8-millimeter projection
or on the tip of a splinter
like sleeping peacefully.
He already paid, Mom says,
you’ll be better off having someone take care of you, so you won’t suffer.
You’re leaving tomorrow,
the coins still jiggle on the table.
I’m writing quickly and in great haste I count four twenties,
just over $4.00 a pound,
stacked one after another,
atop or within,
when my body is a fistula
a safe or a deposit:
it might as well be a treasure chest
because today is August 11, 1951,
the day Mom takes the first hen in her hands,
the day I know
this must be what love is,
forever and ever:
caresses from earlier
the secret in the ear a second before affixation an exchange
the sweet crunching in return
for reciprocity.
(I’m writing this at over-500-words-per-minute: when Mom calls,
do you sense my over-500-words-per-minute? When Mom calls, they are two-out-of-500):
Without asking
I take the hen by the legs,
as young girls, we’re unaware of anything
and hang her next to the clean clothes,
where our names and surname
must be drying in the sun,
once,
in another life
at 12 years old
when our head is empty.
Pack your things. You’re leaving tomorrow, Mom says again in her knife–sharp
August 11th voice.
Obedient above obedient,
unaware of anything,
I’m writing to you as I stuff two skirts and two shirts into a plastic bag.
Meanwhile, the hen bleeds to death.
Drop by drop leaving clues
in a perfect circle
of light in case I return.
I suppose that the coins on the table are also shining.
I suppose.
But chickens never look at the fire.
Mexico City. A 19-year-old woman, a nursing student who had been reported missing last December
3rd, was found dead last Saturday with her face skinned and stab wounds throughout her body.
The student, identified as Erika Kassandra Bravo Caro, was found in the ditch along the Uruapan-
Los Reyes highway near a community called Las Cocinas, The Kitchens.
◆
[1] A literal Spanish translation of “blind hen,” i.e. blind man’s bluff.
