The Recent Unpheasantries or Boopsie’s Farewell to Her Late Southern Gentleman

© John A. Ward

It wasn’t even an American bird like a turkey. No, you had to die at the hands, or rather the wings, of a Chinese import. Actually, wings are like hands with very long fingers that have webs and feathers between them. It’s easier to see in bats. But that’s not important.

It’s the totally unromantic way you died. You weren’t speared by the beak while walking through the field. The flushed avian in its fright flight did not become disoriented and slam into your face. It did not drive its beak into your nostril and through your ethmoid bone to the brain. You were not pithed like a frog in a biology class for the spinal reflex experiment. Then you could have hung from a gorse bush with your legs twitching and no recollection or consciousness of the macabre dance your body performed. That would have been a story.

No! You choked on a bone at Pitty Pat’s Pantry in Atlanta. Since then, I’ve been a vegetarian. I knew eating meat wasn’t healthy. What I didn’t know was the Heimlich maneuver, or I would have grabbed and squeezed the bejeezees out of you to expel the errant skeletal organ from your trachea and onto the plate of an innocent bystander. So what? Who could go on eating after watching someone die right in front of them. Should I have left a tip? Probably, I just forgot.

We didn’t even get to break the wishbone. I would have wished that you lived, but you had choked long enough to turn blue, three or four minutes with no oxygen. You would have been a vegetable. There’s poetic justice in that.

The waiter asked if I wanted a doggie-bag. I said, “I think I’ll need something bigger.” He didn’t think it was funny, but I was hysterical. I still chuckle when I think about it. I know, it’s gruesome, but that’s my New York sense of humor.

John A. Ward was born on Staten Island, attended Wagner College in the early 60's, sold his first poem to Leatherneck magazine, and became a scientist.  He is now in San Antonio running, writing and living with his dance partner.  He has published in Doorknobs & Bodypaint, Clockwise Cat, Apollo's Lyre, Ascent Aspirations, Toasted Cheese, Green Tricycle, Alighted Ezine, Lit Bits, Cenotaph Pocket Edition, The San Antonio Express-News, Antithesis Common, Wild Child, Holy Cuspidor, Idlewheel, Cautionary Tale, Sentence, Sun Poetic Times, Byline, Quirk, ken*again, R-KV-R-Y, The Smoking Poet, Long Story Short and Rose & Thorn.  Links to his work can be found at http://www.geocities.com/jaward04@sbcglobal.net/dancfool.htm .