Ma sent fresh chicken.

At home, she had spent hours

sorting away the guts,

cutting the chicken into equal-sized

yellow-skin pieces, two whole chicken

split and piled in eight small plastic bags.
She had frozen them in the fridge overnight,

and mailed to my city with iced mineral bottles. 
The chicken got unfrozen on the road.
I opened the doubled boxes and inside,

their blood already swelled

out. Mixed with what was once ice.

Becoming pale orange, becoming misplaced diluent.
Their bones poking out like thorns.

Inside, the broken beehived

tunnels multiplying last digits.
The wrinkled plastic bags

form a membrane upon purple

veins and half-hardened flesh,

and are cold, and are dripping, sending out a creep.
I put on the gloves.

To refreeze them in the fridge.
Iʼm not sure when I’ll cook again,

being afraid of using a knife,

of my hands on the soft cold meat,

and the fishy smell

leasing from the deep riverbed of wings.
I also lost count of how many quarantines

sit between ma and me.
Purple, red and opal veins.
Ma had butchered the chicken,

planning each bag of them

for my meals with soup.
The blue-veined, purple-eyed,

pale-fleshed

cold chicken

are so much like us,

floating and shaking

in the more sophisticated scheme of things.
I wonder if it’s the same,

as a life is being pulled

out of its own life.
Like daughter, like mother.
I never learned how to use a sledge.

I don’t dare touch the chicken.
But Ma always does it

Barehand.