Rachel Inish

XXThe Hiss Quarterly || Volume IV, Issue 3

ISSN 1556-245X

RECIPE FOR GYPSY CHICKEN

First you steal a chicken ...

No, wait.

First you light a fire, suspending
A rusted coffee can over the flames,
And boil the brew 'til it's good and strong,
Telling stories in the night, until
The chicken can be stolen unawares.

But wait.

Because first you have to drive your wagon
Across the marshes
To find the land
That houses chickens, but never you.
Squatting there, you can make your coffee,
then steal the chicken ...

No. No, not then.

Truly, first you need a daughter,
Who will learn the ways of
Caravans and making do
And braiding hair
That is too wild for gadji women.

In eighteen years, she will be wise
Enough to cook a gypsy chicken.
And then it's time
For coffee and nets and stolen fowl

And chuckling at farmers who think
September to June makes for a long time
'Til harvest.

© Rachel Inish

WE DO NOT EACH ONE FALL

Death is death, is death is death.
Except when it is not.

A soldier's death -- well, that's one thing.
He is one of the fallen,
With weight. With substance.
His fall makes a sound, and leaves behind it a depression,
Delineating his life.

But the woman at the market, the child on the street,
The father killed in a roadside bomb.
We of the foreign names in our own homeland.

We do not each one fall
but vanish.