It takes almost a year for my aunt’s chicken Tillie
to start laying, the months-younger hens
outpacing her, and I remember being last
to get my period, freshmen year of high school,
which was bad but maybe not as bad as being first.
How we feared existing on the edges: E. starting
to bleed while being bussed to elementary
swim lessons. M. with armpit hair
at ten and the rest of us smooth. How narrow
the window of blending in. But the Ameraucana
is an elegant chicken, silver cheek muffs and a saddle
that shimmers like folds of slate taffeta.
Never mind laying season, Tillie starts in winter,
deep February. When I visit months later
she jumps on my lap, impossibly light
beneath all that fluff. She pecks weeds
from my hand and when beak touches skin
just a brief pinch of pain, no mark left.
Tillie’s first egg was a perfect, pale blue.
My blood looked rusty and I feared something wrong.
It was 1993, no Google to check. I waited a day
before telling my mom, made a pad from
toilet paper I checked between classes:
civics, earth science, what we learned at fourteen.
What becomes routine: decades of bleeding,
pills in shades my aunt’s chickens lay,
discs pressed from packs at the end of each day.
At night, the hens roost tight together, the alpha
supposedly tucked most in center. Usually,
it’s Esme, but not always. My aunt and uncle peer
at their sleeping to see how the clique has shifted.
In the dusty dark, the sweet animal smell. A hen
tucks her beak beneath wings and it could be any
of them or us: looking for a safe place, a self
place to fold among bodies almost like our own.
