Janet Kirchheimer
A friend of mine once asked me if all I wrote about was unrequited love and death. I took that as a sign that I needed to start writing more humorous poems. As I started writing more, I realized though that the poems could and should contain some serious parts to them as well. Writing a humorous poem would still allow me to have some serious undertones and engage the funny side of my writing.
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Chicken
“You’re going to a poultry meeting?” my father asks, which is
a logical assumption since he’s an old time chicken farmer,
and is now hard of hearing which explains why
I’m yelling into the phone, that I’m going to a poetry reading, not
a meeting on the current state of cracks and double
yolker egg prices or how there really are no small farms left,
they’ve all been squeezed out of business.
“A poetry reading Daddy, Donald Hall,
the current Poet Laureate, is reading tonight.”
“Well, maybe you’ll meet a rooster or two there.”
And yet again I’m yelling into the phone that there
will probably be roosters at the reading, but some
of the roosters like other roosters, not chickens.
He tells me to have a good time at the poultry meeting.
Perhaps I’d have better luck if I go there instead.
Farm Days
“I’d file down the metal plate in Gumps’s head,” my father,
a retired tool and die maker, tells me one afternoon at the kitchen table.
“During the summer, when it got really humid, the metal
would expand and stick out of his head.
“The plate covered the hole in Gumps’s head.
He was running a hay baler and didn’t turn it off when
he climbed underneath to see what was wrong.
Hey Julius, he’d say, it’s sticking out again.
Not many people knew Gumps’s real name.
He’d been called that for so many years.
His wife was Mrs. Gumps, and his kids were always Gumps’s kids.
“Gumps worked for Adolph, helping out around the farm, in the chicken coop,
cow barn, and hay fields, whatever needed doing.
I worked part time for Adolph, from one to four each afternoon.
Then I’d go back to our farm and finish my chores.
“Your mother and I raised chickens to sell eggs, but sometimes
we’d try something else to make money.
Once we raised squabs for Victor Borge who had a contract to sell them to the railroad.
Sometimes, I sold chickens to Mrs. Caesaria.
The first time I slaughtered them, took off the heads, and
your mother cleaned them and plucked the feathers.
I wanted to make a good impression.
But Mrs. Caesaria wasn’t happy, she wanted a live chicken.
So next time I brought her one, and she showed me how
they killed them in the old country.
She held the chicken by the neck, and her neighbor
held the feet, and they pulled.
After that, I just dropped off the chickens.
I didn’t stick around for the show.
“I built an egg room for Adolph were he could grade and pack eggs.
Your mother helped out in the egg room sometimes and brought you along.
You were fascinated by the fly strips that hung from the ceiling.
You thought they were ribbon candy.”
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Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us, a collection of poems about her family and the Holocaust. Her work has appeared in journals including Atlanta Review, Potomac Review, Limestone, Connecticut Review, Kalliope, Natural Bridge, and on beliefnet.com and babelfruit.com. In 2007, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
A recipient of a Drisha Institute for Jewish Education Arts Fellowship for 2006-2007, Janet is a Teaching Fellow at CLAL–The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership where she teaches adults and teens about Judaism using creative writing exercises and poetry.