23
No Fruit So Wonderful as Want
Brian Cooney
Her daughter wrote from camp about the dance.
A kid came up to let her know the guys
all thought she was the ugliest girl there.
Our waiter repeats the specials.
The Beaujolais arrives.
She’ll have the sea bass with tomato and caper sauce.
The humidity rises in advance of midsummer storms.
How tiresome it is, she says, this heat.
The talk drifts to chickens. A neighbor keeps
a few in his backyard, where they brood
near a shared stone wall, live off table scraps.
Her husband sighs
coyotes can be a nuisance.
Awakened by squawks, the neighbor had found a hen
wedged half through a knothole in the coop floor,
strewn bones and viscera
in the fetid space below.
It is sickening, she blurts,
to watch that child eat.
(as originally published by Floating Bridge Press in his 2015 Chapbook, My Idea of Fun)