The Chicken Carcass
By Priya Jawandha
There will never be more of a summer than now. Busy sounds of a kitchen, gentle and volatile. A bristly voice singing in his native tongue while cutting the chicken carcass. Singing it a merciful lullaby because maybe the gruff man worries it met death without being given rest. He holds the carcass by where the ears might have been, he knows he might be wrong, yet he hopes this and the ghana will be enough to drown out the fierce sounds of the knife hitting the cutting board. The space between his eyebrows holds his heaviness, a wrinkle. You remember him telling you that he was a vegetarian.
The fast, unrhythmic clapping while making roti comes from a woman who has lived a life. An unexpected melody to accompany the sounds of the placid lullaby for the chicken’s wake. The making of roti is not the sound of a soft clap of your hands, it is the sound of a thunderclap, the first one signals death and the last one signals birth. It is a prayer. The carcass will live another life. The echoes of the thunder claps make it across the room faster than his singing, but you hear both.
Four languages float through the air, cursing the outside heat. They start to pass through you because you begin to focus on the sounds the stovetops and the ovens make, a language on its own, yet you can understand it better than the four others. They are gentle in their lovemaking, but violent in their sounds.
The fruit flies cling to your clothes as you haul the last bag of garbage out. The rotten smell making its way into the pit of your stomach with just one breath. Some of the carcass might be in here you think. The cola you pour for yourself when you get home gets stuck in your throat.
When the chicken lives another life, you know that it will choose to become the carcass in the kitchen, it will want to hear the lullaby at least one more time, even if it means facing unfair death, again and again and again. At his birth, he will look forward to his wake. He will not know that some of him ends up in the dumpster behind the building that hosted his wake, but even if he did, he will not mind. You swallow any deep sighs because you started running out of breath two weeks ago, you save it for tomorrow, because every breath you take in that kitchen is precious, it holds a life. Soon summer will end, and you will know when it feels like there are hands on top of your ears, when you think you are going deaf because you don’t hear the violent whispers of the stovetops and the ovens. You will vaguely hear his gruff voice singing, suave Hindi mixed with a dialect of Punjabi, you will hear thunderclaps in the background and if you close your eyes you will think it’s raining. Summer will end with a knock in your chest. And you will spend the next three seasons waiting, waiting to hear that lullaby at least one more time.
Priya Jawandha (she/her) is an artist and writer from Calgary, Alberta. She is an incoming first year university student at the Alberta University of the Arts, hoping to pursue graphic design. Her work usually focuses on capturing specific moments and memories in an attempt to immortalize them. She loves Billy-Ray Belcourt's poetry at the moment, and is an avid reader of books, especially non-fiction and poetry. She has a popular tiktok account @justabore where she posts excerpts, poems, and quotes from authors she looks up to, it is almost a collage of herself.