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