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“C,” that’s how Amber Dawn’s poem “Chicken Dance,” begins. This “C” is also a “See,” because it marks the beginning of an explanation, that rightfully frequent explanation called how did I become whatever it is I am? This opening C might be a C+ or C-, or whatever grade might have been assigned to students for whom “the guidance counselor foresaw striptease.” (In a culture where our lots in life are drawn ever-earlier, a C may well be how “how it begins.”) This is emphatically not the “C … C … C…” that punctuates an ode to “Cunt” in The Vagina Monologues; no, this “C” passes over titillation in favour of visiting the “hetero-norma-tittie spectacle” of a strip club; it is not the C of cliché but instead the C# heard “when the house lights / unmask stretchmark blues.”

“H,” that’s the next letter introduced to Dawn’s remaking of a childhood ditty. For those who didn’t partake of interminable rounds of this summer camp classic, let me explain: it’s an annoying song. Wherever one traipses at camp, some gaggle of youth will be competing to see who can belt out its singsong notes the loudest. By subverting this relic of childhood nostalgia, Dawn draws out the way in which “childhood” – another C – is not necessarily the pastoral time of protection and pure possibility that many like to picture. Rather, in Dawn’s estimation – and we can’t know whether this is hyperbole or description – “our after-school program was Alcoholics Anonymous” and “was too down-turn bitten / to employ a guidance counselor.” Yet, by breathing the playful rhythm of “Chicken” into such a tale, Dawn refuses us access to the comfortable and normative readerly position of pitying the poem’s speaker; anyone entering the poem with the desire for social class inspiration porn will be reminded that “it’s called a lap dance not a rock-bottom dance.”

“I” arrives in the middle of the first stanza, but only to announce the poem’s suspension of the first-person perspective. Indeed, “I,” in the middle of the word “chicken,” is de-centered here. When it’s introduced, it has no action attached to it –

in truth my high school was too down-turn bitten
to employ a guidance counselor “I” in the middle
of the word, no cheerleading coach either…

– as if to echo the very difficulty of claiming a voice in a scenario in which one celebrates a “bittersweet sixteen” or dances in “the bumfuck ballet / around the brass pole.” The only moment at which “I” is active comes in the second line: “in high school I had really great tits.” That this lone “I” statement is rendered in the past tense leaves the reader without any direct claim on who the speaker of the poem is now, which “I” enjoyed. We tend to fetishize “overcoming” narratives, and we like to champion those who learn to leave their pasts behind (which is usually to say, repress them). The “I” of Dawn’s poem refuses to do so, as without any clear “I,” readers aren’t given the vicarious pleasure of identifying with the poem’s speaker.

“C,” you’ve already heard.

“K,” in baseball, means a strikeout. In a bank account, it means a thousand “dollar bill[s]” or “a credit card,” of someone being “straight-for-pay,” perhaps. “K” marks the way in which this poem makes me want to hear much more about what kindergarten would be like at a school bearing the motto, “DI NATUS SQUALUS / PER MORTEN SQUALUS / (Latin: Born a Dirtbag, Die a Dirtbag).” K represents potassium on the periodic table of elements, but “I” am fairly sure that this poem is about anything but bananas.

“E”ven if one isn’t familiar with the text from which Dawn’s Epigraph derives – Stein’s Tender Buttons – one can admire the way in which Dawn combines the playfulness of a children’s song with Stein’s modernism. In this combination, it’s not Easy to tell if the less straightforward lines – “nature nurture torture tutor schooled ass / alas in the woozy air, head in the oven” – mimic babies’ queer babble or modernist experimentation, or both.

“N” brings us to the nth degree of suspension – the final letter is, interestingly, never announced in the final stanza. Citation of Stein brings us home (to roost). Stein’s “alas” is repeated, incantation-like, “alas a new bruise / alas, stiletto shoes, stabbing dagger / piecing poultry tit-side up on a clean surface.” It’s repeated, like the chicken song itself, but with a different, inscrutable longing.

And that’s how you read … “Chicken Dance.” »