Chris Santiago - The Poet's Mother at Eleven, k**ing a Chicken lyrics

As for the bird, its pedigree was impeccable: rose-combed & indigenous co*kfighting in its blood. My grandfather had folded its ancestor under his arm in a bolt of jute & the boxcar dark. He was young & bound for the Provinces, fleeing with his bride the rifled capital, the Arisaka Type 99, its stock chrysanthemum-stamped, its blade jabbed half-jokingly into my grandmother's stomach—swollen the private thought not with limbs but a stash: dowry. Doubloons. Maybe even meat. In the clatter & sway the hen held its tongue, producing eggs but no epiphanies though the flesh of its forebears had delighted the palettes of missionaries, good- intentioned Baptists in the wake of cholera & reconcentration: nationbuilders. Tenderfoots. Virgins still wet with honeys**le & whitewash who brought among other things Home Economics, so that fifty years later my mother would have to corner & seize it. Wring its wattled links. Pluck it & gut it & waste nothing. Fold the bloodline into hers.