Research: Journals
The Journal, Issue 31.1
Prose: "Morning Spares Its Shape, the Heart Beating Alone"
by Jeremy Lybargerwhich a henhouse aint no place for a sick woman to lay, but our beds is got ants and purdy says some fresh air’ll do her good, i guess he’d know. but too its hot there, windows painted shut and birds panting, a hundred shotgun brides, in ammoniac rhythm of stifled brood. stranger dogs smell her blood and lope from miles to grope in famine at the henhouse door, i blunt them with shovels. which a dead dogs eyes is spacerocks.
purdy pulls a bag over her face to keep flies off, we’re godfearing folk, and anyway still bonnet drones in the captor light to stare akin to the dogs, suckling her dirted thumb and the gusts of her rubber mattress doping breathless: shes infectious, i say, get on asleep, until bonnet shrinks bawling to the underbrush, no wonder her scabid arms. ettemina though, she dont care, past twoclock the tv hackles descend, drag amongst the yard from her holy attic where children are forbid, the sick lady hears and flutters with the hens, who lay eggs. purdy says she got distemper, or bellyworms, or says who knows what ills women conceive, they aint whole like men, shorn from our rib. the body is a bible none but fools will read, he says, i guess he’d know. ettemina sometimes gets the womanblood and drains in bed for days, tv raspy like salt through walls, and shes never died once, so who can say. but women have catastrophe luck. plus that henhouse stink, fatty solstice white sours of noon, birds in a flicker and feathers spellbound in air where one blear of sun blondes through a knothole no bigger than a dolleye. the sick lady churns and curdles on the floor, lice staccato on her pretty, nothing said never but only at night a bedraggled ravel of tongue like the prayers of unransomed kin. once she puked all down her face and bonnet had to scour it, which she hardly liked, bonnet didnt, cause shes tenderhearted. but me i got this little egg incubated in the shed i got to mind, the mother hen dead of botulism under april skies, and i spell sudden hours in that swelter of birth. most things twitch their whole life trying to get born, more or less. shes only got the one shoe, the sick lady, which when purdy sleepwalks, his summer affliction, he jitters over her brute achilles and curses like a handclap, the hens swap horror, ettemina raised upright in the attic belting glass goddamgoddamgoddamn you purdy! only purdy rations his laughter like a haiku there in the dark and the sick lady goes on dying.
the hens also shit however they want.
bonnet has combusted hair and feverbumps on her lip like how maybe she ate a engine, milkteeth all in orbit, and i maintain no sick lady never got no better looking at facerot. which to make her easy, the sick lady, we make funny like whats the difference between a hair piece and hair pie, she dont know it, and bonnet throws shadowfish on the wall in evenings thermal light until purdy says quit that it aint christian, and we do. it means something that i saw him, purdy, plucking blackeyed susans from their smother fathoms below etteminas attic window, which when she empties her bedpan the blooms convulse and bruise, to lunge them as a bouquet into the sick ladys fist. purdy says she got choked up then, i guess he’d know.
too its easy to squander the shape of time when you live like us on the shag hide of aftermath, each sun the bloodwelt in a shock of meat and only etteminas songbird television to tally this rotary of days. not that we study the sky much, only sometimes the ground is lonely business and that distance between earth and sky is the height of man, purdy says, your own height aching onto god. yet clucking hens never stop, rows of birds like china in a cupboard, vinyl-eyed and gnawn, wings flexed in a baffled cramp of gravity so aint nobody can sleep deep. the hen is a impromptu animal, same as a assassin.
the sick ladys skin is the tint of a chainsmokers linoleum, shes sweated beyond her dress in a runaway molt, i guess her dugs are smaller than etteminas but her pretty yawns in the daylight like a gutted fish you want to like lace up or throw quarters in or something, purdy breaks his vows just gawking at it. though she aint nothing to look at really, which makes her dying some easier. theres a carnage of dogs in the yard, bonnets named them all potluck, which the buzzards on the roofline cant dispute. to think a shovel is about the saddest instrument there is, guess i’d know.
the sick ladys hands have caramelized like etteminas winter breath, purdy holds them like how he gathers eggs. she just strayed into our yard one afternoon looking like the kind of woman who’d strayed all her life, dress menthol blue, eyes blue, bones a metal swooning to rust. she was windraw, an embarrassment of air, and etteminas tv kept bristling buy now! buy now! buy now! in a sort of terminal tin drunk, so we did.
and anyway purdy shot her in the heart this morning, the sick lady. its been a bad season for hatchlings all around, and i know how bonnet squalls when we wrench the beaks off, but its gotta be done. sometimes you hurt for something and its good, as purdy knows: who saw her body sweeten like candy there amidst those dogs, a bullethole, sad static flower. the truth runs like blood through a womans channel, ettemina bedsore all those years with the only explanation what television told and i found to be fact:
a mother hen will eat her young.
