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"Kurt Vonnegut thought the chicken's chemical makeup was hilarious." M.A.C. Farrant addresses writers and their chickens in one of three modern farmyard tales.
They sing in a foreign language like opera I’m told. A squawk is a kind of aria fugata.
Mostly they’re like old men gathering beside the meal replacement shelves at Safeway. That’s why Emily Dickinson crossed the road, to speak with them about death.
Kurt Vonnegut thought the chicken’s chemical makeup was hilarious. It reacts as if it were some kind of puritanical harbinger of death, he said, and that’s why it keeps crossing the road. Kurt Vonnegut did a drawing of a chicken’s asshole that has since delighted many.
Chickens will peck each other to death. They can’t help themselves once there’s a wound. They’re like us that way. They love the smell of blood.
Although shaped differently, the chicken’s beak works similar to a human’s mouth, ingesting one small truth at a time.
Chicken Little Syndrome is the condition of hysteria that results in paralysis. This happens when the sky falls on a chicken, another way in which chickens are like us.
At a chicken funeral sad music is played while a chicken relative carries the dead chicken wrapped in tinfoil toward a brightly lit fast food restaurant where a rotisserie awaits.
Unlike us, a chicken is without a love interest or a dog.
A chicken’s brain is about the size of a man’s thumbnail. Like our brain, it’s not big but sufficient for the chicken’s needs.
In my day, my father said, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
Ernest Hemingway said the chicken crossed the road to die. In the rain, he added, and wrote several novels about this.
I cross the road because even though I am a boiling fowl I am still able to cross the road.
There are twenty-four billion chickens in the world and only one billion roads. What will happen next?
I found this question in a magazine: How do you know if you’re a birder? The answer: You are a birder if you have ever faked your own death to attract vultures.
Someone must know about Hugh and me.
