I didn’t grow up on a farm so how would I know if it was a hen or a rooster, this creature left at my door and carrying a note in its beak saying in familiar but hard to pinpoint handwriting, “Can’t take care of Taylor (notice the unisex name) anymore; please provide for my friend.” In no time, we grew close, Taylor and I. Our daily walk, always unleashed, would be down a long footpath bordered by grassland. Taylor might momentarily stray but usually return or else I’d find him/her because she/he never went far. This one time, though, we passed an area with a brood of seeming relations, all looking much like Taylor, and insistent on joining us as an entourage. Although I managed to keep track of him/her for a few minutes, soon I couldn’t tell her/him apart from the rest, didn’t remember for example if Taylor was one of those with red on the wings or orange, had a spiky comb or shallow one, strutted around with his/her mouth half open or closed. In short, my rooster/hen was lost (to me) in the crowd. I called, “Taylor, here boy/girl, come,” and it struck me that Taylor, despite our special relationship, might have taken offense from day one that I couldn’t even determine her/his sex, the poor bird. Claiming that it wasn’t spelled out on the delivery note would not save my hide, of that, I was sure. The number of chickens now surrounding me grew immeasurably large, adults commingling with newborns sprouting from all corners.
I spotted a Chinese man who might have been a woman in a shopkeeper’s apron in front of an Asian grocery store under a clear blue sky or painted ceiling. She/he was on a ladder putting up a long horizontal banner over the front door. It depicted a sinuous multi-curved dragon, baring sharp incisors and characteristically breathing fire. “Excuse me sir/madam but I’m trying to identify my rooster/hen.” “Ah, yes,” the shopkeeper empathized, “this happens often. Fu Zang can handle it.” At that, the dragon, coming to life, climbed out of the banner and began devouring the birds, one after another, by the hundreds, until only one was left. “Works every time,” said Fu Zang’s owner, wiping his/her hands in self-congratulation. “Taylor?” I whimpered, crouching down, and hoping against hope. He/she hopped on my lap, and I suddenly saw on his/her hock joint, partly obscured by feathers, an emerald ring that I failed to notice before. It was a birthday gift my ex-wife/husband, Morgan had bought me. I flung it at her feet as she was departing for greener pastures. Aha! Could its return be a hint at reconciliation?
Fu Zang looked exceedingly self-satisfied, but the dragon owner brushed aside my offer of a photo of Taylor autographed with the creature’s footprint as a thank-you. I toyed with the idea of substituting the ring, just in case. Good thing too for when I arrived back at my apartment, Morgan was waiting for me at the door, sporting a newly sprouted moustache and rouge, and wearing high heels and a derby, demanding the return of Taylor, now that the old bird (Morgan, that is) had come into an inheritance that included a massive estate and poultry farm in the country. “I’ll take that ring back after all, chump. You may remember you insolently hurled it at me when we went our separate ways. I should have hocked it straight off. And Taylor will be taken care of in style. I shall make amends to the stately fowl who taught me to be proud of who I am.” Off the three went, the ring glistening in the setting sun, leaving me to brood over the outcome of events and ponder my very identity.
The maniac was balancing on top of a fire hydrant and threatening, with a can opener, a stuffed crow hanging from a rough braided rope tied to a lamp post, an action I found to be unconscionable and one which I could not let pass. My pleading and cajoling got me nowhere. The bird, meanwhile, from a gap in its belly, seemed to be shedding its stuffing, grey, laundry lint-like fluff. Refusing to let his behavior pass, I challenged him – “You think you’re so tough, buster. Why don’t you get yourself off that plug and see if your feeble can opener trick will work on me?” Eventually he did just that and began waving the weapon close to my face. The bird somehow extricated itself from the lamp post and dropped, rope and all, into my hands. I freed its neck and set it down on a patch of grass. I gave the perpetrator several good whips on his behind with the rope, which temporarily mortified him, although not enough to subdue a thirst for revenge. The maniac took aim, preparing to hurl the can opener at me but just then the bird came to life, flew up and pecked at his eyes, causing him to crumble in pain. It retrieved the can opener which had fallen on the ground, reached a damaging height and let it fall on the oppressor’s head, this followed by unloading something dark, slushy and patently unappetizing on the same target. The maniac was now doubled over and weeping. I gave the bird a thumbs up as it turned its head to me before taking off for a cluster of trees. I thought I heard it call back, “Sayonara, amigo.”
Aida, the Bearded Lady
It was only 50 cents, so I bought a ticket. A mere five of us made up the audience in an auditorium seating perhaps 500. She was gyrating on a slowly rotating turntable in the middle of the stage. She had made no formal entrance, was just there, stoutly in place, maybe had always been there, wore red harem pants and an oversized top, very gauzy but nothing you could see through, both billowing in response to a rickety high-speed floor fan stage right. Piled on her head like a turban – a red, twisted, and moist bath towel. A veil covered the lower portion of her face. In between - blue, lifeless eyes. An endless loop of the Verdi aria, Celeste Aida (Celestial Aida), composed for tenor, was piped through a tinny loudspeaker. Other than a little shifting back and forth from the hips, she rarely moved, at least of her own volition, though the turntable stage went relentlessly round and round. She raised her hands to either side of her cheek and languorously removed the veil to reveal a beard, reddish and tinged brown, not all that different from my own. The other four customers, three men and a pre-adolescent boy in the first row, constituting a single party, cheered wildly. The men tried to toss crumpled up dollar bills into the brass urn in front of her but missed every time. The music and turntable stopped. The performer’s ample behind faced us. This must be signalling the end. She bowed, but to the rear of the stage. The group of four exited as did a stagehand carrying a sign announcing that the next show would start in fifteen minutes. There were no closing curtains. I stayed put, watching. The next thing I knew, still facing backstage, she ripped off her fake beard, tossed it aside, undid the entire Scheherezade get-up, wriggled out of it, and turned around. Pitifully staring at me in embarrassment, was a man who proceeded to run into the wings in tears. I felt my face scrunch in puzzlement and climbed onstage, examining the discarded beard, the spitting image of my authentic one. The stagehand returned. “Dear God, Aida, not again; where’s your costume? You’re on in five minutes.” So, I changed into the spuds she left behind and ascended the turntable. Soon, the audience members from before returned, munching popcorn, elbowing each other with grins, and pointing at me. The turntable began to spin and, with the vocals resuming, there I was, center stage, without regrets, in the role of my life.
Over the top, SWAT-suited and submachine gun arrayed, they rushed him in the bathroom one morning as he was brushing his teeth with watermelon slushie toothpaste. Claiming to have several dozen warrants for his arrest, they handcuffed him, hauled him out of his house, flung him onto his pitted asphalt driveway, and charged him with agitation. He asked if they were police or just some cockeyed militia. For this cheek, he got several swift jackbooted kicks along the side of his body which was enough to make humble pie a palatable alternative to argumentation. He assumed a more subdued tone with his captors, asking what he could do, “kindly constables, sirs,” as he put it none too mellifluously, to reduce his sentence, not that he was ever informed of a sentence, or his rights to an attorney or to remain silent, or a trial date, and so on. The Chief of the motley crew, recognizable by a tarnished badge affixed to the genital area of his suit, consulted a loose stack of papers carried by an assistant. After half-an-hour he found what he was looking for. He told the prisoner that he would be released on his own recognizance (even though, not being a court representative, the Chief had no authority to do so), if he composed a poem deemed worthy by the Prison Board. Without thinking twice, the prisoner began reciting, “Roses are red, violets are blue.” Straight off, the Chief interrupted him, by smearing the sole of his booth across the prisoner’s mouth, careful though not to apply too much pressure. “We’ve heard that one before, bud. We’re talking original.” The SWAT force waited, taking toothpicks to their teeth, juggling balls, scratching their behinds, and yawning repeatedly. The prisoner, no afficionado of poetry, was racking his brain, trying out different combinations of words and phrases and rhymes. Exasperated, he finally asked the Chief, in the gentlest and most polite manner he could summon, whether the Board would accept, perhaps, “pretty, pretty please” he almost wanted to add, a prose poem. “That’s it, bud. Always looking for the easy way out, is it? C’mon boys, let’s get this chump to the clink. They’re gonna’ throw away the key, I guarantee it. Prose poem, my ass.”
Philip Wexler lives in Bethesda, Maryland and is retired after a long career at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Over 220 of his poems have appeared in magazines. His poetry books include The Sad Parade (prose poems) (2019), and The Burning Moustache (2020), both published by Adelaide Books, The Lesser Light by Finishing Line Press, With Something Like Hope (Silver Bow Publishing) and I Would be the Purple (Kelsay Books), the latter 3 all published in 2022. Bozo's Obstacle is due for release in January 2025 by In Case of Emergency Press. He has also organized and hosted spoken word programs throughout Montgomery County, Maryland over many years.
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