by Chris Mesch
“a reputation as poor man’s food for being
cheap
and plentiful
and servants would sometimes bargain with a new employer to not be given heath hen for food more often than
two
or three days a week.”
The greater-prairie chicken,
they are booming
at the pasture rose altar
of the oak savanna.
Fire four rounds
and a blank,
a blindfolded can
backstopped by a grain sack.
They are booming
in the trees.
Seed is spilling out
the frayed hourglass hole.
Do they know what is lying
in the tallgrass prairie
for the third time this week.
For the fourth time this week:
four booms. a blink.
Chris Mesch is a writer from Chicago whose work navigates the intersections of labor, spectacle, and the quiet violences embedded in class narratives. Outside the coop, his work interrogates class narratives, bureaucratic absurdity, and the uneasy space between performance and truth. Sometimes the workers are people. Sometimes they have feathers.