Cocorico by Jacques Audet; for more information, visit https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/audetpainter

by David Brennan

Green rooster bulging pregnant

It’s not hard to love me, spoke the warped fowl

his interior a specimen already hatched, shelled of egg, plucked of feather, smooth and unrecognizable as bird, reptilian cousin awaiting birth from the father-box, this portrait

of a preexisting condition

You were my favorite pain, spoke the rooster

before erupting a snake mouth from his brain, interior eaten clean, bag scraped of flake, wing sucked of meat, the father-box a carcass a shred of the plentiful dead an actual body a casualty a parasitic

hunger that says to hell with its host

This breakfast too real for our bowl

About David Brennan

Dave Brennan‘s books include If Beauty Has to Hide (Spuyten Duyvil), a collection of cross-genre work, and Murder Ballads: Exhuming the Body Buried Beneath Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (Punctum Books), a work of creative literary criticism. His poems and essays have appeared and are forthcoming in BOAAT, Timber, Always Crashing, Heavy Feather Review and elsewhere. He teaches at James Madison University in Virginia.