Margaret Easton
'You're Telling Me'
You’re telling me the bantam’s been pecked
a hole big as a shilling head in shreds,
you knew to knock her cold but couldn’t, nothing
deserves to die eaten like that, its bones show,
not bleeding, you’re explaining, bantams don’t
unlike us in that respect, though stiffening
in a mess of feather and pimply skin, the others
on the coop steps, which one next. I keep seeing
gym bags on cloakroom pegs. Not much chance
the vet reckons, but for twenty pounds, surgical clips,
stitches, she’s in the corridor learning to sip
blue medicine. I’m listening, but now
it’s grandma saying how quick cuffs and elbows go
once they start to run, darning over and over
the red wooden toadstool a bone of her hand,
and how I mustn’t mind what grows back in those holes
it’s just what they do to each other, bantams.
Page(s) 35
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