How To Dress A Chicken

Mother, with her long, strong-fingered hands
and one sure stroke, beheads the chicken
tied to the clothesline with strips of an old dress,
a red print noose around scaled yellow skin.
She steps back, watches the bird flap and plunge,
the splattering blood staining the bright grass dark.

Scalding water turns white feathers dark.
They stick in clumps to Mother's plucking hands,
reeking and loosened by their steamy plunge
into the foot tub. Undressed, this barnyard chicken,
stripped to its pink, pocked skin,
becomes inanimate, a piece of meat to dress.

Teach them something practical, say, how to dress
a hen. My father's sister saw a doom-dark
future for Mother's lazy reading soft-skinned
girls, a devil's workshopful of idle hands.
A daughter should be taught at least to cook a chicken
before she's fit to take the marriage plunge.

Sixteen, in home-sewn muslin, Mother plunged
into that cauldron, no means of redress.
She singes the down feathers from the chicken
with a rolled newspaper torch, bright flame, dark
ashy feathers and paper on Mother's hands
and on the bird's pimply soot-pocked skin.

Pinfeathers pop out of the nobbled skin
under her strong thumb. She washes, rinses, plunges
into the body cavity with her seeking hands,
mines out organs, liver, gizzard, heart to dress.
Sometimes she brings up gold out of that dark,
a shell-less ball of egg yolk, chick to stew with chicken.

Disjoint the legs, first step in cutting up a chicken,
bend the thigh joint till the bones shine through the skin
like a knuckle, aim the shining edge of the dark
blade at the highest, whitest part, cut. Plunge
blade into flesh at the breastbone's high point, dress
out the wishbone, later to be split by daughters' hands.

Daughters are not work hands, any fool can learn to cook a chicken.
Mother, light of foot, is not soft in her address. My aunt, thick-skinned
and plodding, waits for us to plunge, mother, daughters, all into eternal dark