So I was talking to my folks earlier today and my dad said Hey, do you remember Thanksgiving from years ago?
And I’m thinking of how we all used to get together at my grandma’s, my brother, two cousins, and I happily at the kids’ table, the walk after dinner in the cold Sheboygan night to the bridge we all spit off of, . . .
No, not that memory. Wasn’t that when your apartment was broken into?
Yeah, my first year in Montréal! Thanks for the memories, Pop!
Eighteen years later and I STILL double-check my windows and locks.
Anyway, may you all have had as boisterous or as peaceful a day as you desire.
thankful for your continuing takes on things abbeats, a poultry poem for turkey day:
Passing a Truck Full of Chickens at Night on Highway Eighty
What struck me first was their panic.
Some were pulled by the wind from moving
to the ends of the stacked cages,
some had their heads blown through the bars—
and could not get them in again.
Some hung there like that—dead—
their own feathers blowing, clotting
in their faces. Then
I saw the one that made me slow some—
I lingered there beside her for five miles.
She had pushed her head through the space
between bars—to get a better view.
She had the look of a dog in the back
of a pickup, that eager look of a dog
who knows she’s being taken along.
She craned her neck.
She looked around, watched me, then
strained to see over the car—strained
to see what happened beyond.
That is the chicken I want to be.
-Jane Mead
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