When you place the oval head
of your pterodactyl nugget into your ketchup
you walk a thin line of awareness that
I as your parent
do not fully understand.
What meaning can we make of the dead?
The answer is buried deep,
recognizable only after we have made
the thing into what we think
a thing should be.
We don’t want to eat a chicken
that looks like a chicken
but a part of our brain knows
that the chicken was once
a dinosaur, was once
a ruler of the world.
It’s why we put shoes on the dead
or lip liner where we think the mouth
should go. It’s why language is another
kind of container, a shell full
of something we can consume
but never really know.
It’s why I should say something beautiful
to you here, but instead I sit
and watch my son anoint his nuggets
with sauce and in this moment
they are holy.
—Luisa Muradyan
Luisa Muradyan, originally from Odesa, Ukraine, is the author of American Radiance. Additional work can be found in Ploughshares and Guernica.
