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Click title to download PDF microchap
Cover photo from the web
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Chicken in the Moonlight
Crowned tufts of red net
sit on felted beak hoods.
Feathered arms flutter
with two-footed flits.
Turn left. Which left?
(Look to the rooster if you forget.)
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As a six-year-old girl,
I never mastered
the dance of the chicken
from La Fille mal gardée,
re-choreographed for children.
I could not recall
when to flap,
where to cluck.
I always made sure
to stand in the back.
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My missed marks
were hidden
behind much better
chickens.
So, it was decided—
I had
no talent.
I quit.
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Eventually, I found
my knack, doing math.
Swirling multivariate
numerical functions
danced around the flowers
on my blue cotton nightgown.
I dreamt of my best friend,
the ballerina,
her long hair coiling—
a hidden reptilian
snake in a bird’s bun nest.
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We grew up.
She quit dancing
and went to Johns Hopkins
University.
Her surgeon’s scalpel
pirouettes
inside patients’ flesh
with a twist of the wrist
and a quick arabesque.
She never has the time to dance.
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I dropped out of college.
The backyard is my stage.
Late at night, I dance—
under the glow of the moon
for the silvery stars
and all the things
that never
will be.
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Sonia Beauchamp © 2021
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Sonia Beauchamp is a massage therapist on the North Shore of Oahu. Her poetry and art have appeared most recently in Literary Mama, Sad Girl Review, and Typehouse Literary Magazine. You can often find her surrounded by feral chickens in her backyard.