Chicken Soup: For Joanna Ruth Bock
Rent from DeepDyve- Chicken SoupFor Joanna Ruth Bock
Instead of your soup I picked us upa six-pack to split. But since you’re six hundredmiles away I guess I’ll drink yours too and hopeyou catch a vicarious buzz through the poem.Here’s to your health. Hey, I’m tryingto make this warm and easy on the throat.Fun fact: did you know that chicken noodlesoup was invented in the late Middle Agesby a Benedictine abbess named Mariadella Fabriano when she tripped and droppedthe roasted chicken for the All Saints’ DayFeast into the bathwater of Sister Francesca?And what, you may ask, would such a crucialroast chicken be doing so closeto Francesca’s bathing quarters? Historysuspects the aroma was so intensethat Mother Maria could not resistspiriting it directly to give her lovera sniff. Imagine their faces,pressed close—as medieval nuns,remember, they might eatfresh meat twice a year in flush times—imagine them leaning in, eyes half-closed,both their faces aglow in the heat from the fleshjust pulled from the fire, and then the splashas it slips from the platter into the tinytub where Francesca soaks. Imagine [End Page 107] the bird bumping warm against her skin,waves brimming the edge of the tubas she madly pulls herself up and outto shiver naked at Maria’s side as they bothstare down at the floating corpse of the abbey’sholy meal. Oh, they’re screwed. So screwed.And each on her own has already learnedto accept the probability of hell,but neither is willing to abandon the otherto damnation, not to mention expulsionfrom the abbey and likely death on the streets,so they hatch a crazy plan, and haul the tubback to the kitchen, chop vegetables,throw in strips of dough, and ladle it into bowlsfor every sister at the feast, and for the visiting monksfrom the next friary who’ve come to overseethe proceedings. Mother Maria calls it divineinspiration, this new dish, and every holy personagein the hall gulps down spoonfuls of Sister Francesca’sbathwater, her first bath in weeks, and all pronouncethe soup delicious, and give thanks in prayer, and Mariaand Francesca are saved, and go to heaven,where they are now, I promise, could anyonemake up a story like this? [End Page 108]
Scott Beal’s poems have appeared recently in Rattle, Muzzle, Poemelon, and other journals. He won a Pushcart Prize in 2013. He teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan and has served as a writer-in-the-schools in Ann Arbor and Detroit. His first book of poems, Wait ’Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books), is forthcoming.
