Chicken Wings

Tables festooned

With platters of chicken wings

Waiting to be dipped in hot sauce

But first there must be cauldrons of chickens

Squawking and flapping

Clucking and scratching

Fused into a living stew of suffocation

Awaiting the relief of extinction

Their white and brown feathers

Harvested for stuffing into sofa cushions

Their birth rates

Forced mechanically

Until the market for their meat

Explodes into tubs of hot sauce

 

Ted Goodell

July 2018