The Broiler Chicken

Her comb is no longer red.
It’s meaningless to preen.
She stands hunched as a deadpan mushroom.
Only flesh matters in her man-made coop.
.
She cannot forage in freedom.
She’s not a living thing.
There isn’t any wax to seal the pain-pores.
Bedding absorbs her vibrancy.
A dust bath, she longs for.

No cluck.
Nothing hatches.
Her thoughts transform into coral tree thorns.

Reek of feces and death dominates.
Yet her blind mates peck voraciously.

There’s neither a postmortem nor an FIR.
This is a recurrent licensed murder.

The first prize winning poem in the Creative Writing Ink Monthly Contest.

Previously published in The Literary Hatchet