![]() Murgiwala You do what you always do. Everyday. Unaware anyone would take special interest in it or in you. You choose a chicken. See them all fly and land, fly and land frantically. Clutching at the metal grate with yellow, flakey toes, pointed nails. Hoping it’s not their cage you open. One from the middle. You reach in and a storm of white feathers covers your hair and get stuck in your beard. You grip the chicken by its legs, place her against your chest, cradling her in the crook of your elbow and with the other arm smooth out her frightened feathers, standing on end. The feathers calm into soft slickness, and so does the chicken. It’s as calming for you as it is for her. She trusts you. And until, and even after, you slit her throat you care for her intently. Now you prepare her and yourself. This is your journey together, after all. Khuda gave you both life, gave you both sustenance, gave you both your time and you must honor the breath shared between you. You have the same mother. Siblings bound by earth that permanently stains both of your bare feet. You place her back in her cage and she understands. You tie a stained apron around your waist. You wash your hands, methodically, under Rihanna bhen’s null, whispering the fateha and looking down at your carefully cut nails that you scrub vigorously each night with an old toothbrush. You wipe the blade, set it on the small wooden lorry. You slowly draw her back out of the cage, wrap her in white cloth and extend her neck. Plucking clean the feathers on her neck. Bismillah irahmaan iraheem. A precise, quick incision. Blood drips down into the bucket you’ve placed below the counter. A jerk. A gargle. And her head loosens, submits, and a cloud dulls the bright black of her eyes. The next part is mechanical. A customer approaches you on the curb. You take an angled blade and ease off the feathers, plucking with expertise, moving against their lay. You wipe the bare, pink body with a damp cloth. You take what’s whole and undo it, to be sold off in limp, wet segments of a former self. You reach in and pull out the beating, the cleansing, the circulating parts, the working parts. The parts that helped her run, peck at seeds, make babies and warm them until hatching. The insides of her in your hands. You tug and carve until she’s hollow. Quick slices at the joints, between the breasts, thin alongside the ribs. They stand in the street as you work, fat and fluid dripping down to your elbows, watching you clean and discard, clean and discard. You pack a tight parcel of cellophane and they add it to their bag filled with namkeen and black market whiskey. You wash at stains in wood, in concrete, in flesh, as a ritual more than to forget blood. You put your topi on and push your lorry down the gully to your home, just in time for maghrib namaaz. You repeat this day 7,300 times. They call you Murgiwala. * * * Roadkill Altar rust-red birds. dug from clay and cycled blood. the color of iron-rich cities exhaled by trees. the color of… slashes in maps by derelict diplomats. made from the strut of goats up Jabal al-Madhbah. dipped in tomorrow’s kill and yesterday’s slaughter. wings splayed and molting ripe for Return to earth to tragedy to unforeseen loss to spilled guts on the side of the road. less pretty than the owl you peeled off the highway asphalt with all its feathers intact and displayed between crystals and candles. The owl that sees beyond the deceit and masks of colonizers and flew into headlights anyway. which is kinder: an altar or an open-air slaughterhouse? with the slow grind of nose and beak back into gravel. and a slit between the Dead Sea and Gulf of Aqaba that will never fill with water. * * * Worst Case Scenario when the mourning doves return without their babies my mom accuses the air: maybe they were eaten; maybe they fell out of the nest and couldn’t fly; maybe they were crushed under a calloused foot. her imagination runs only in one direction. when I was a kid it used to take me two hours to eat dinner/ chase it in circles around my plate. they would accuse me with their forks: lost to daydreams. I think back then my dreams were wide, liberating, expansive; I think back then I imagined strange and delightful possibility. my imagination ran like spokes of a wheel in all directions. I see the way she watches the world as if it’s about to collapse, is collapsing under her feet. and her with no wings. I close my eyes and watch the backdrop of my mind: jasmine bushes shrivel, sun eclipses. and cycling are a series of daymares. snapped bones and collisions. the mourning doves fly and land, fly and land. peck at seeds littering the ground, propelled by their necks. chests puffed up when they’re cold. they glide low to the earth to the tree across the yard, their wings fanned into a kaleidoscope of white and gray. and when I don’t come to the window they dream of me hand in hand with my mom like a summer day. * * * https://entropymag.org/the-birds-3-poems-13/
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July 2021
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