print previewback LESLIE ADRIENNE MILLER
Carcass Balance
The disgusting package of the phrase
designed to conceal and amuse,
reeks of the macabre that falls
in a hole as deep as any kind of love
we know. How do we imagine
boats and trucks of dark fowl parts
lining up to travel east without
the sneak of our own grief?
How begin to recognize human beings
so happy and fat on leavings
they decide to adore and then
to prefer them. And how consider
the days it takes for the unwanted
parts, already old like the ones they feed,
to reach a shelf. The alternatives
come from further afield, washed
in chlorine, clean, but even older
than the dark rags of belly and leg
from bones so small they recall
a child’s. And it’s not lost on me
that my son prefers the dark,
refuses to touch the pale breast
when I bring the bird whole in a paper
cage, fill the house with its sear
and whichever spice was left on the warm
rack. There’s always something dim
and gray about tearing apart a bird
with your child looking up, grease
on his downy chin, fat under my nails,
the heap of shred neither of us will touch,
even after I’ve delivered it so patiently
from bone and string, peeled back the pocked
skin, and laid the white slices across
a bed of greens. Once I loved a man
who worked a poultry farm no more
than a single summer, but ever after
shunned the meat. He’d roast and eat
the tail or snout of any other beast,
but these with only two feet, wings,
and so much airborne fluff
were the nightmare in which
we’re all completely sure we’ll end,
not with the warm surprise
of a viscous pool of blood, but the holy
terror of all our air sucked by a storm
of plucked and swirling wings. 
Carcass Balance
Furs
Swamp Lullaby in a Dry Year