CAROLYN RAPHAEL

THE BOY IN THE CHICKEN SUIT

For Rady

Dialysis when he was ten, relentless
laundering of the blood; reprieved by two
doomed kidney transplants; gone at twenty-eight.
A one-act plot, but long on character.

His mother speaks first, seizing the mourners' ears
as she pours a distillate of pain and love.
A key change when his co-conspirators
tell stories of their friend's outrageous pranks.

Returning to the dorm, one friend recalls,
he saw his room stripped bare as a monk's cell,
a weekend's work for an epiphany.
(Embarrassed laughter wraps around the tears.)

Another story—about a bed (declared
"off limits") that toured the campus, photographed
at restaurant, zoo, and river boat—returned
with a keepsake album to the proprietor.

And then there was the fuzzy chicken suit,
light armor for the siege against despair.
One day it joined a large aerobics class,
led by a hirsute, dancing Dionysus

who preened before a mirror, blind to Maenads,
panting in their leotards for a glance.
Blind, also, to an antic chicken, drunk
with joy, abandoned to the pulsing beat.

Young mourners giggle unrepentantly.
Relatives nod affectionate assent
while school administrators rush to find
a suitable demeanor. The mother smiles.

originally published in Cumberland Poetry Review, Fall, 2003

Carolyn Raphael recently retired from the English department at Queensborough Community College but is still teaching literature courses there. Her poems have appeared in The Lyric, Pivot, Edge City Review, Poetry Digest, Orbis, The Formalist, Iambs & Trochees, and Cumberland Poetry Review. Her chapbook, Diagrams of Bittersweet, was published by Somers Rocks Press in 1997.