Chicken Juice

By Vita Emery

“It’s very good to be a very lonely love poet I think.”

The words are scrawled across the bathroom wall, and I try to imagine the person who took the blue permanent marker to the spot above the urinal. But I don’t want to rob them of this one certain thing, this knowledge, that it is very good to be a lonely love poet. This month, I am dating a man who believes that some people can feel each other across continents. And who is to say that this person, who once owned a working permanent marker, wouldn’t feel me touching the backs of their eyes, reaching around for their sense of surety? But I’ve already done what I always do, running away from myself into other people’s lives. And I think that for at least today I should try and be me.

So, I wander away from the café, into the local supermarket, the one that smells like roasting chickens. Though I have never seen a roast chicken for sale, and lack any other corporeal evidence that they are being cooked, I can’t help but think about the bodies, plucked and pimpled with cold, even in death. But the smell is warm and homey, making me nostalgic for something that was never mine. In my head, I see a young boy, a little you, tearing into a leg while your mom boils water for tea. The walls of the kitchen are painted an eggshell blue. And you’re happy because you know that there will be leftovers tomorrow, that your mom will make that tangy chicken salad you adore and lump it onto toasted and lightly buttered bread. You always said you liked it when I made my healthy version of chicken salad, with yogurt instead of mayonnaise, but maybe, after all, you were looking for a life that wasn’t diet this, low-fat that. And right now, with my eyes closed, I can almost taste that life.

In this chicken-scented moment, I feel it down there, a soft sweet reminder of juice running down the inside of my leg, and you were there to lap it up, putting it back into my mouth when you came up for air, me getting to taste my own pleasure. But you’re gone, and I still want to dis-identify my soul, make it yours. Even though I know your response was, would always be, to remind me of myself, to get me to taste me.

And now the smell is gone, and with it, my sense of possible escape. It all feels a little sad. Because this time, you really are gone, and I still haven’t found a way to stop trying to get away from myself. Now when I open my eyes, I will be staring down the cereal aisle. But I blink and all I can see are the kids in Russia who never get a chance to decide between Fruity Pebbles and Lucky Charms. I am not sure why they are here, with me, in this other country that prizes choice most of all. But they are; inside my brain, jumping up and down. They aren’t sure if they are jealous or afraid, and I don’t know how I would feel either, if I were them, which means I don’t know how I feel at all. I need you to tell me the history of Russia, to give me context, so I will know. I want to go back to those other memories of you and me. But I can’t find the chicken smell again; it never seems to be coming from the same place.

Instead, I slide my finger over cans of tuna, Chicken of the Sea. I remember a now nameless-to-me celebrity once saying they thought that these cans really held chicken. Her skin probably smelled like sweet chewing gum, the kind of smell that makes a person think about easy laughter and sunshine. I am not that girl. I wish I could spread the fat from chicken, the grease under my arms and carry it with me so my scent could warn potential mates that I am all nostalgia and complicated viscera. But even if everyone in the world smelled the same, I could pick a beige wall to stand against and you, only you, would know to look because you have tasted my pleasure and it makes me bright. I want to be bright without you. But I’m too afraid to be the only messy one, the one who smells like chicken instead of bubble gum. So I do what I’ve always done. I keep jumping into other people’s lives.

I think about opening a jar of pickles from the shelf. If someone catches me, I’ll just stick my stomach out, tell them I’m with child. An almost mother who craves salt. She’s carrying high, so it must be a boy in there, they’ll think. But they won’t guess that he will crave mayonnaise coated poultry. What would it have been to be your mother instead of your lover, to have a kitchen painted eggshell blue?

I work with a girl who regularly drinks pickle juice. I always wonder what she does with all the pickles once she has sucked them dry. Like one does with the bones of a chicken, she might make stock. And take the stock to someone who has had a bad day. As if the stock could do anything but remind the sad person that they do not know how to make stock from pickles. It’s very good to be a very lonely love poet, I think, and wonder where I put my own permanent marker. I see a woman at the checkout buying what looks like a box of pens, and wonder if she is a poet. But she is not me, and I am sure I have my own pen. If I find it, I bet it won’t have ink.