Chickens Coming Home / I woke up at one A.M. and checked the election results. / Then I couldn't sleep. / I was thinking about my great-great-grandfather. / He fought in the Civil War / The first one - for the Confederacy. / And when my father talked about him, he always referred to him in the same way - / As a SUCKER. / Him and all the other white subsistence farmers in the part of eastern Mississippi where the soil was no good. SUCKERS. / They found bigotry and superiority so compelling that they would act against their own economic interest - even LAY DOWN THEIR LIVES - / To protect the monstrously ill-gotten fortunes of a small white Southern elite. / We live - now - in an oligarchy / And the oligarchs got the president they wanted. / And some of their voters - the poor, the weak, the pregnant - will find themselves laying down their lives to protect the fortunes of the oligarchs. / Am I a sucker? I vote for candidates beholden to the oligarchs who value precedence and decorum. / So probably. / At three I fell back asleep and dreamt of the last piece of chicken in the world. / Everyone fighting over it / Tearing off the last pieces of flesh as they get smaller and smaller / Gnawing on the cartilage / Until nothing was left by the bones.

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