Elana the goose. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas.
September 1, 2024
Elana thinks the world is coming to an end, but I remind her how this is a fundamental problem of perspective. She is both right and wrong, and so am I. Elana, insofar as I can tell, contains the multitudes most other three-year-old Sebastopol geese and humans above the age of thirty lack.
When I open the coop, this Amish-made shed, painted blue with little herb planters beneath the windows, she tawdles out, screaming, as geese often do. Her adopted babies (three gray “African” geese) and a duck trio waddle out after her; they test their lungs against the air, honking and such over the sounds of slow traffic on Penrose Avenue, the warblers waiting to share their food, four dogs barking on the other side of the yard, those big black vultures competing for pool water, and my neighbor’s white cat, everybody’s nemesis, lurking at the edges of our fence and licking its lips at the thought of baby birds. The nearly last living rooster is sexually tepid, but eager for food, guiding all thirteen hens to the snacks I’ve dispensed, clucking them over to what he’s “found.” Elana grooms my pants leg, then unties my retro number 8s as if desperate to return to summer, to the sandals that ferried my bright green bare toenails out to her like so many flecks of potential vegetation. Failing, she looks up at me quizzically, or, like, Where the fuck is my food, nigga?
The backyard is pure dirt. That hanging obstacle course I installed over six hours for the kids at the height of the pandemic hangs limp between two lantern fly-ridden trees. Beyond this, the original shed. Field mice scatter at the sound of my approach, and I let down Zagreus the cat (spawn of Hades), plump and insouciant, who stares at them, bored. She follows me inside, dodging nails on the weathered little ramp, and meows as I toss handfuls of bugs and worms on the ground from an orange Home Depot bucket; they’re light and crunchy in my hands. A groundhog scurries off into my neighbor’s yard. This is .23 acres of Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a pseudo-suburb made up mostly of white assimilated Jews; but now, as we negroes approach a thirty percent population density my black neighbors and I cackle at the dog-whistled concerns about “where the neighborhood is going.”
The sound of Elana’s chirping as she gulps from the hose is simply pleasant. Her minions splash in the kiddie pool. Sometimes I sit down for a minute and wish the fowl would devour me.
September 5
Today, two ducks fuck just outside my bedroom window, a soon-to-be-dead silky rooster and four geese circling them and crowing/hissing/clucking/honking as cloacas kiss at the center, with some eloquence, considering the shitty green water over which they buss down, beautiful, like the sound of palmate feet patting down mud. When I open the window, they all scurry off like teenagers caught skipping early classes to learn how their bodies work.
The geese sprint back to the window, greedy-ass Betty the hen tagging along in the hopes she might snatch up some greenery from the hand that feeds. Once, I gave in to my son Eli’s begging, and let him take the birds some watermelon on his own; I watched from the very same window as Betty leapt into his arms, scrambling the watermelon and sending him fleeing into the house yelling, “Daddy! Daddy! Betty attacked me!”
She reminds me of those aggro chickens in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, but she looks a bit more like an imperial chocobo rocking a dark harness around her neck, greedy-ass Betty, waddling up to anybody’s open hand who might have flashed greens or watermelon, parsley or carrots, peas or broccoli. She was indignant all summer, pecking at cat-eye nail polish, confused as to why the clack of her little beak wasn’t followed by anything like pleasure. Worse things happen every day. When she was a chick with twenty-four of her chirping homies in the brooder at the foot of my bed, Betty was the first to hop on out like a grown-up and get half-swallowed by the puppy, Rize, who, before her first real taste of chicken flesh thought it all was just a game. Eli doesn’t remember those years ago when he was four and his pursuer was just a tiny curious marshmallow with a beak. Now, he runs in circles around the fire pit clutching mealworms in one hand and asparagus scraps in the other, yelling “Betty chill! Chill Betty! Oh my God!”
These days Eli and his twin brother prefer gathering eggs and dishing them out to neighbors and friends, fetching black pepper or Adobo from down the street when I run out in the middle of making dinner. In this form of equivalent exchange, they come to feel useful.
The backyard is pure dirt. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas.
September 7
I suppose I thought I was building something. A place where, rather than sucking up mold in Frankford, my family, or those who chose to—wherever choice is a valid category—might thrive on a time-out from power, the proliferation of drug addiction, and the failures of social reform or divine violence. I didn’t then imagine myself becoming like my grandfather at first, welcoming in all who need and then growing exhausted, mean, or resentful in the aftermath, having failed to help anyone else or myself, having failed to build anything tolerable or work hard enough to one day not have to work so hard anymore. When he died early of complications from HIV/AIDS and everything else, he’d still never stepped foot in my place; flattened to the floor of his room when we found him, he’d held steadfast to the prospect of his own home, surprising as it was through bone-shattering labor that he might ever own such a thing. Today I watch said home burn completely through on Instagram and in the group chat; a fire started by the guy squatting there took the life of one cat and incinerated the dingy couch where my mother once slept, under which I’d found, at my angriest, some young boul’s discarded gun. I’m fifteen minutes away now and feeling much closer than I ever chose to be.
What had happened was, after ten years of tryna buy a house with the VA home loan and being thwarted by racism and cash offers, I stumbled across a rancher in Elkins Park with six barred Plymouth Rock chickens in the backyard. I asked my realtor if we could add them to the deal, and, despite the weirdness of the request, he relented, the sellers consented, and there we were, a flock.
We made upgrades: fencing, a bigger coop, Kaina’s tulips in the vegetable garden, more asparagus and collard greens, watermelon and kale, flowers in the wooden boxes along the fence.
And not two years later whiteflies will have decimated the collards and the asparagus will be growing wildly all over; I’d even find a tall stock in the front yard next to a pumpkin my children planted under mulch; green onions will have bolted, flower boxes grown dilapidated, and Elana will have lost a lover and a chunk of her left wing to a family of neighborhood foxes whose faces, when I catch them one day peering through the fence seem to scream to me, “Just to get by,” like Talib Kweli. Friends and family will have cried over dead chickens both named and nameless, and Freya the hundred-pound Ridgeback who likes to sleep with my other son Max will have hunted one of our own, bringing her back to me battered and bloody and hardly holding on, whereupon for the first, but most assuredly not the last time, I will be forced to finish the job.
September 12
Today I’m in too much pain to do most anything and have trouble walking to the bathroom. Sciatica or some shit, the busted hip from that time I got hit by a car in Guatemala, a lack of rest from the recurring nightmares about money. I’ve been growing less mobile too fast, less capable of overdoing physical tasks. I have no qualms asking for help, just a shortage of helpers. My mother wants to fill in, as black mothers often do for black boys, helping. But she has never done this before, and my obligation to raise her in my home is also raising my blood pressure too high to sustain a life past fifty. Things are filthy in the yard, but the birds are alive, my mother is alive, and we have a place to be.
September 16
The children tend not to see the birds fucking, which feels like a pedagogical loss. Filming them feels too pornographic. Kaina hated springtime’s sexual flurry when we were together, watching the first rooster, her namesake, grip the back of a hen’s head and pin her into submission. Some hens go half-bald, their feathers snatched up from fighting, over the rooster or over food, or being fucked too frequently by said rooster.
Kaina always broke up the activity whenever she could. If we humans fucked at the edge of my bed, a bird or two might approach the window next to my bare ass and Kaina would shoo them away. “Get the fuck outta here, Elana,” she’d say, laying on her stomach, my hand still taut on the back of her neck.
Today, rain makes many pools of mud out back, and while the chickens take shelter under our biggest tree, the ducks and geese party through the storm; they hop around in short gallops and take flight over the pool, quack, and toss their bills into the mud, shucking up old oyster shells and worms, tearing whole weeds up by their roots or otherwise yelling at a car or two passing by under the bleating patter of raindrops.
September 19
Elana laughs when I read her Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection in the morning. I wonder out loud if she feels rejected by me when I’m traveling for work, the way my daughter does whether she says so or not. We’d gotten used to COVID, when I was earning the Ph.D. and teaching eight classes online, the era where my children could find me at home, fortunately or not, all through the morning, the evening, and the night, always knowing I was just out of arm’s reach. Elana jumps up on the firepit where I sit, and just when I think she’s come to cuddle, that she might sense some melancholy the way Ken the bernedoodle does, she tries to eat my earrings, pull hairs from my beard.
A vulture, interloper. Photograph by Joseph Earl Thomas.
September 21
Today I find a yellow-bellied flycatcher chick in the front yard, having fallen from our main tree, closest to the road. The flock first regarded these little brown jawns (LBJs) as a menace, invaders crossing the fence to sop up free layer-feeder pellets, but the chickens have gotten so bored of them they just let it happen now. Rize carries the chick around in her mouth like a football, dodging the other dogs and slobbering this way and that. It’s a little wet, this bird, and terrified, while Rize prances around. There’s no blood, but the parents circle me, chirping to high hell about their child. And I know I’m supposed to leave the babe alone, let it find its way some way. Most likely this fledgling was attempting to fly for the very first time; letting it die feels ridiculous. I place the chick at the top of a playground I’d built for the kids a while back, worried that it would get eaten alive by beaks and bills the size of its whole body were it just on the other side of the fence.
September 22
In the morning I find the warbler on the ground again, hopping about in the mulch over dog toys and feces, children’s toys and water bottles, cardboard boxes and toilet paper rolls that the twins had used to make their robot costumes. Fuck it, I think, and take the little guy out back where I laid down the feeder pellets and mealworms while all the other LBJs scatter and make way, Elana and them approaching the weakened baby with amused pity. Fuck is this? she chirps, turning her head sideways like that meme of a Pitbull’s confuzzlement. But instead of being brutal like I thought she would, Elana nudges the baby with her bill and then just walks away. She spots Bob, the strawberry-stealing chipmunk strolling out of the shed, and chases him down with her wings spread before coming back to yell at me like, You finna do something about this shit?
September 23
I’m groggy this morning, having slept little if at all, but I force myself up. The guilt of not beating the sun makes me anxious. I know for a fact that if I’m unable to read or write a lick before these wild-ass kids emerge, then the whole day is already over. Outside the little warbler is gone. Not a trace of him anywhere, and I fill the kiddie pool, where the ducks play like any other time, and dish out some worms and veggies and weeds out back before opening the coop. I could hear the crowing, quacking, honking for freedom from across the yard, but strangely, when I open the side door they don’t just start rushing out. Even when I call them, mainly Elana and Betty, no one moves. So I prepare myself for death. This is what happens. Often, when a bird dies, the rest of the flock turns timid for a bit. A month ago, Arthur, our soft boy rooster who followed my daughter around and didn’t care about food, who’d hop onto your lap or shoulder if you stood still, eventually tried to play with a stray cat. When I found him he was hardly put together, but I tried to patch him up and hope for the best. That next morning I found his body.
Today, I have no choice but to open the main coop doors, which are sometimes stuck because of pine bedding piled up against one, heavier if Elana’s been spilling all the drinking and bathing water on the ground because some chicken looked at her the wrong way. There’s no smell. But as soon as I turn the handle, dozens of warblers scatter out. Others knock into windows desperate to escape; some are slow on the uptake, just munching on feeder pellets or drinking water like nothing; a few are trapped in nesting boxes next to the main egg-layers—four Golden Comets the kids all named Jared after their mom’s new partner—and the Jareds are seriously perturbed, making that noise they make whenever you move a too broody hen. There are so many warblers flying out over my head, fleeing into perches and through spider webs, bouncing off the walls with a wooden knock each time. Frantic. Elana walks right between my legs and out the door like there’s nothing to see; there is nary a dead bird, eaten by the worms and weird fishes, just a strange confluence of winged desperation.
But no sign of the little guy either, who days before fell into the yard and Rize’s mouth. By the time I get all the warblers out of the coop, Eli is outside barefoot again, as he often is whenever he senses I’ve left the house.
“Daddy,” he says. “Are you okay?”
And I tend to take a deep breath before turning around. “Yes, Eli. I’m okay. Everything is okay,” I say.
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer and gamer who lives in Philadelphia. He is the author of the memoir Sink and the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer.
