By Steven Winn

Featured Art by Gary Cartwright

Somehow inside this wire-walled farrago,
Its strutty discombobulation half
Parade of plume and barrel-bottomed flank
And half a mad stampede for any door,

She stands apart, her neck up-stretched and target
Eyes aimed off somewhere, and stands her ground,
Each step a claim on just that spot, the way
Her spindled claw alights to clutch at sand

While high above, a royal in a bulbous
Ornamental coach, she barely takes
It in, crown swiveled to and from the broody
Babble of the mob, their rancid screams.

Something percolates, something like thought
That makes her beak beat down magnetic to
A speck of grain then up again to bring
The morsel down her rippling throat, a throat

That then becomes a spectacle, engorged
To twice its size, complete with guttering
Sound effects, one wing flexed out to show
She can and on another whim retracted,

Head turtled in and out and torqued so fast
She nearly does a full-on Linda Blair,
As if to advertise the fact that she’s
Detachable, a thing of separate parts.

A haze of downy silt hangs in the flock.
Tail raised and primly twitched, she ambles off,
A countess in her gown with time to spare
Before she hears the ax head split the air.

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Steven Winn is a San Francisco arts critic, for Musical America, Opera, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and former Wallace Stegner Fellow. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Nimrod, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily. He conducts stage interviews for San Francisco City Arts & Lectures, heard on 130 public radio stations.