They sing in a foreign language like opera, I’m told. A squawk is a kind of aria fugata.
Mostly they’re like old men gathering in the meal replacement aisle at Safeway. That’s why Emily Dickinson crossed the road, to speak with them about death.
Kurt Vonnegut thought the chicken’s chemical makeup was hilarious. It reacts as if it was some kind of puritanical harbinger of death, he said, and that’s why it keeps crossing the road. Kurt Vonnegut did a drawing of a chicken’s asshole that has since delighted many.
Chickens will peck each other to death. They can’t help themselves once there’s a wound. They’re like us that way. They love the smell of blood.
Although shaped differently, the chicken’s beak works similar to a human’s mouth, ingesting one small truth at a time.
Chicken Little syndrome is the condition of hysteria that results in paralysis. This happens when the sky falls on a chicken, another way in which chickens are like us.
At a chicken funeral sad music is played while a chicken relative carries the dead chicken wrapped in tinfoil towards a brightly lit fast-food restaurant where a rotisserie awaits.
A chicken brain is about the size of a man’s thumbnail. Like ours, it’s not big but sufficient for their needs.
Unlike us, a chicken is without a love interest or a dog.
In my day, my father said, we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.
Ernest Hemingway said the chicken crossed the road to die. In the rain, he added, while writing several novels about this.
I cross the road because even though I am a boiling fowl I am still able to cross the road.
There are twenty-four billion chickens in the world and only one billion roads. What will happen next?
I found this question in a magazine: How do you know if you’re a birder? The answer: You are a birder if you have ever faked your own death to attract vultures.
Someone must know about Hugh and me. 