CHICKENS & EGGS

By Kenton K. Yee

All the lectures you spent transcribing
what the prof said & now
how your students are tapping out
what you say
even though what you don’t
is more important: how eggs came
340 million years before chickens; how
no child turns out as envisioned;
how what you wanted & still do
but can’t get is the elephant
in every word. 

But don’t write that down! Elephants
are easy to remember. At the conference,
every sideways glance
feels intentional. You see the foreheads
of their appraisals, the wrinkles
on every trunk, the ivory curl
of each tusk. Mozart. Escher. Dali.
The pursuit of curlicues & birds
& walls is necessary to make
more rooms. In the window seat
going home, the disheveled chick 
eyes you (and you him)
behind the reflective panes
as he climbs backwards
into a cracked eggshell.

---

Kenton K. Yee’s recent poems appear (or will soon appear) in Plume Poetry, The Threepenny Review, TAB Journal, BoomerLitMag, Sugar House Review, Terrain.org, Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, Constellations, Mantis, SLANT, Full Bleed, and Cutthroat, among others. He writes from northern California.