Chicken Bone as Closure

By Alexandria Peterson

Chicken Bone as Closure
Tonight at the ER while I’m sitting in a teal
plastic armchair peeling plastic by the flakes
I’ve undergone the five stages of grief, made
my retributions with poultry, considered
veganism as spiritual guidance. I have been laid bare,
been stripped, laid victim to my thoughts
for the last eight hours, chicken bone still lodged
in my throat, self-inflicted wound—is this
metaphor? I tell myself yes, then type
in my notes: The chicken bone / is metaphor,
wound / in throat. The chicken bone / is white
and violent.
Which is to say,
the chicken bone / is my father.
Sophocles would applaud, male senate overturning
democratic rule in favor of chicken bone
feminism. I wonder, where are my Pushcart
nominations? I have started and finished Carmen
Maria Machado’s In the Dreamhouse in this time
of penance, relived at least three relationships,
regretted four, considered how people rarely
have anything in common beyond what we want
to have in common, how we plead
with them and then with ourselves, wondering
what it means to reach an ending
until we are reduced
to soiled bedsheets, to chicken bone
in throat, the precipice
of an ER bill. The man to my right says, “I hope
you brought food,” in a West Virginian accent
thick as a chicken thigh, as the bone
in my throat, pressing against my esophagus
in an act of domestic terrorism. “Because I’ve been here
for twelve hours and entered
some sort of cardiac arrest
in the last six.” I tell him he can take my place
in the last supper. Once I leave the man
with his backwards hat and McDonald’s
bag, swaddled in a flannel placemat and staring
after me, strips of teal beneath my fingernails, I am told
by the 2 AM shift doctor
there is no chicken bone, only moderate serrations
and future scar tissue and, Here’s the check, ma’am
$300 for your atonement, take as you please
Don’t mind if I do, the irony is not lost on me.

Alexandria Peterson was born in Orlando, Florida and currently lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her poems have also appeared in Gulf Coast Journal, Frontier Poetry, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal.