by Clayre Benzadón

and damn, these chickens can’t lay
eggs anymore, but they still run
like the last zesty citron bomb at Trader

Joe’s for the bucket, they escaped the pen,
bombiculanus (bees) up the sleeve,
the world is ending without the mustard

medallion center dramafold, the question
of whose chickens these are, who
laid them first, the neighbor,

or the ducks stuck in the cage too,
how are all the yellow hens escaping?

Chartreuse bloom
lined up along the walls:

I harvest a little chick by hand,
cram the chirrup into a crate,
shellack the top—

I leave the box in front
of the neighbor’s back porch—
She won’t know

until she opens
the cardboard: I switched out
those bombastic babies’

almost-life, the shell
of their eggs

for lemons.

Clayre Benzadón (she / they) is a queer (bi /pan) Sephardi-Ashkenazi poet, educator, and activist. Her manuscript, Moon as Salted Lemon was recently named an honorable mention for Miami Book Fair’s 2025 Emerging Writer’s Fellowship and was chosen as a winner for Driftwood Press’s Editor’s Pick Poetry Prize. She has been published in places including Jet Fuel Review, Libre, and SWWIM. Find more about her here: clayrebenzadon.com.