Before She Came to Ohio

my grandmother raised peacocks in her front yard because no one in town had ever done it, and by god those birds were pretty as pearls. Imagine: curved road up a mountain pass, then bursts of blues and greens against the asphalt. Everyone wanted something beautiful in the staggered lines of chicken coops, broken fence, shotgun dust on the door. There’s very little that gets to live without contribution. She’d hang chickens by their legs from a hickory limb, heads chopped one by one, left to drip dry. The peacocks plucked seeds beneath the feathered chandelier. No one required their eggs, made sense of luxurious plumes next to milk goats, a butchered hog. When one died, we buried it as a sacred body, planted its feathers as weeping cherries along the driveway, the old woman’s heart parceled with it. When the chickens were empty, she’d cut them down to pluck bare, taught the girls how to fry them breasts first.