All in by Linda Dove

by Linda Dove

The woman declares there are no more chickens,
none, in the coop, in the yard, on earth. What she misses
first are the eggs, then the feathers, because a world
without eggs might mean you are hungry, but a world without
feathers means you can’t fly. Chickens can’t fly, the man
reminds her. Right, she thinks, putting away the shears
that she used to clip the flight from their wings. It was small
flight, she reminds herself, but at least the chickens
could clear the fence. She has the same resentment
towards the fence that the birds did, but she doesn’t try
to get away. She moves from room to room in the house,
touching the things she’d have to leave behind.
She always stops at the grandfather clock with the moon
in its face. How to pack up time? she asks to no one at all.
How to manage something so tall, how to lock its door?

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Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. Her books include In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019). Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University.