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      October 5, 2014For Those Who Would Kill ChickensAmy Miller

      I wish I could show you
      how we saved him. Named him
      Steven, stupid name
      for a chicken, but
      when he wandered
      out from the woods,
      black sheen hooked
      with leaves and the crazy
      red rubber of his comb,
      we had to call him
      something. I thought
      Lucky after a horse
      stomped him so hard—
      caught in the corral
      like a mouse in traffic—
      then maybe Rip
      when he tucked his head
      in the elbow of the foreman’s
      wife and fell asleep
      in her arms. Steven,
      she whispered—who knows,
      some baby or a friend
      long gone—and it stuck.
      I could show you
      my sandwiches he pulverized,
      his crooked Jagger dance
      on the paddock’s dusty stage,
      how each of us came
      to grudgingly help
      this alien flown from some
      coop, how a thing
      like that takes root
      on a shelf in a dark
      tack room, settling
      on an overshirt you meant
      to take home that now
      is sacrificed—no matter—
      to this thing you’ve named,
      that needs you. Each night
      we closed and locked
      that door against whatever
      was out there
      that hadn’t yet learned
      his name or the iridescence
      of his weak and perfect wings.

      from Poets Respond

      Amy Miller

      “I keep thinking about what I would say to those four teenagers who broke into a Foster Farms barn near Fresno on Tuesday night and brutally killed 920 chickens for no apparent reason. This is one of those stories that send me to the depths of despair and make me think that we humans don’t deserve this good thing we have on this planet. But I realized, after the initial thoughts of vengeance—always tempting, like a stiff drink—that what I really wished for those kids was a time capsule to take them back to some place where they could make a connection with an animal, just one, to know it in their bones and carry that feeling to that later fork in their lives, when maybe they would have made a different choice. I guess I wish them love, as clichéd and ineffectual as that sounds. There’s a lot of talk right now about whether empathy is overrated. But I think empathy is our gift as a species, one of the best uses of our unusual brains. We simply haven’t used it to its fullest yet; we haven’t evolved enough to live up to it. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying.”

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