When my grandmother made fried chicken it took on spiritual sublimity.
The way she would cradle the chicken with maternal caress.
And she would sing, not sing sing, but evolve into the mistress of song,
As the smell of paprika filled the dingy apartment.
And she sang with a wispy tone only cold nights can conjure.
And it was in this song, which soon became a chant as time and sound collapsed
and collided
That no longer was I listening but experiencing the sound of the woman's voice.
A voice that ripped trees from their thick roots and pulled the sun across the sky with chains of cloud.
And, of course, I stood there watching from across the kitchen and I felt the stiffness
of my bones,
Almost offending the situation, as if in my awkwardness I was taking away from the solar eclipse in front of me.
But she sang and I hated myself for standing with bones loud as engines when I moved them.
It soon became too much,
The shallow popping of chicken frying,
The woman before me exposing sound,
The creek of bone,
I felt as though the room around me was coming closer,
As if the world outside the poorly polished windows was beginning to cave in
And I felt nothing but the panic that I would be caught because of my loud bones.
Finally I screamed and this woman, in all
of her primal glory
Looked from her pan of browned chicken skin and stared
And I just stared,
As if wishing my existence had not tainted the sanctified spectacle that occurred
some ten seconds ago.