SCREAMING WOMAN I was five, taken into Arkansas woods, where an old couple lived. They were distant relatives. They have no names, just images. I don’t even remember the husband or the other men who dragged her out screaming. I was transfixed, flung into a nightmare. She was naked, squirming, screaming: “Don’t take me! Don’t take me there!” Later I remember asking—Take her where? To the hospital, no ambulances would go that deep in the woods. She had cancer but refused to go. Act of mercy, her husband finally said okay. Like a barn razing they came, four of them grabbed her, carried to the old black car, screaming and screaming. I‘d never seen a naked woman, never used an outhouse where I hid before I threw up and swore I would never die. For a long time, it was like a dream, but Aunt Sallie gossiped and my adult mind remembered like finding out the monster under the bed was real. ELEGY FOR WASTED CHICKENS We already know the way they do it, squashed in cages, unable to stand, move, spread wings until it is their time to become Wangs or cordon bleu or parmigiana, make Popeye and the Colonel richer. Even the defective tiny chicks are gassed like baby Jews, the yellow from the stars cover their quivering bodies. In the cafeteria, my student shouted: “Yuck, throw those wings away. They’re disgusting; I hate them.” My daughter boiled chicken, a fat breast and a leg quarter for her dog, but it was too fatty, crunched it down the disposal. Does it matter if the chicken is eaten? In Chicken Heaven is there a kind of dignity if you are consumed instead of a funeral in a garbage bin? HUMAN BITES A mosquito is born, a human is born. Both destined to die. The mosquito does not know this. Mosquitos will never think on it, no concept of prevention. The insect will just do its blood thing and die. That is the difference between the two. The human seldom thinks of death. Eventually, the human accepts reality. When he does, he doesn’t want to die. He is against dying but realizes it’s a futile thought, a deceptive myth, numbs himself with myriad palliatives— an apothecary shelf of addictions. Why do humans, who know they will die, devise so many ways to kill each other? The mosquito might give you a better answer.
A recent octogenarian, Vern Fein has published over 250 poems and short pieces on over 100 sites. His first poetry book–I WAS YOUNG AND THOUGHT IT WOULD CHANGE–was published last year and he has his second one coming out soon. He has no Muse; the world of poetry is his muse.