Jenna Kelly | Foreword to Injecting Chicks with Meth on Easter Sunday

Jenna Kelly is a senior at Coe College, studying neuroscience and psychology with a minor in creative writing. She works as an editor for its literary magazine, The Coe Review. Her writing is often the offspring of practicing new techniques and inspiration drawn from various science lectures. Her poetry is set to appear in Sleet Magazine and was recently published in The Hamilton Stone Review.

Also by Jenna Kelly: Three Poems An Interview with Neil Hilborn

December 7, 2016

Jenna Kelly

Foreword to Injecting Chicks with Meth on Easter Sunday

Three days later I’ll be breaking beaks like bread, crumbling seconds with freshly-knead avian hallucinations. We have mastered the metallic dialect of hungry needles with hands on high. I’ve seen our savior through the residue of stale Peep bodies sighing out signals in alabaster smoke, clucking out sticky hymns that gurgle like holiday wines.

The poem's title is quite self-explanatory. This particular work was inspired after I spent this past Easter in my school's psychology laboratory, observing the reaction of young male chickens to their environment and its association with methamphetamine. We found it humorous that we were, in a sense, participating in an innocent holiday tradition. Our experimentation involved the festive chick, the figurehead of egg hunts and sugary bliss, second only to the infamous bunny! I was also amused by the fact that I was spending one of the most celebrated days in Christianity working with an illicit drug that has been strikingly vilified. The next day, this piece was born from a blend of holiness, innocence, and their curious intertwining with such substances. Despite the relative brevity, it became quite the prized and personal project.