They’ve Run Out of Organic Eggs at the Health Food Store

So We’re Going to Steal a Chicken

I.

Have you seen that one scene in Tampopo? The one where the lovers
pass an egg yolk between their perfect O-shaped mouths, careful

It’s less a kink and more a tenderness:
the yellow yolk of egg passed mouth to mouth.

not to break it, erotic as a scoop of steamed egg jiggling in a bed
of sesame oil & chives. I want to be as beautiful, as smooth as a French

The painter cracks an egg, discards the white,
and leaves us with the yolk, smeared on canvas.

omelette, as enigmatic as the egg-yolk jelly, as mouth-watering as
a tray of pastel de nata in the Paris Baguette storefront at the local H-Mart.

The egg tooth, price of passage to this world,
shrivels after hatching, only a stub.

Is it true that there’s a bad apple in every basket, a bad egg in every carton?
My mom packs foam crates of century eggs into her shopping bag & I wish

Preserved by alkaline transformations,
this egg is not a century, only months.

I could be celebrated like those stinky eggs, even if only once a year, as tradition,
to cherish the bad egg, the salty egg, the queer egg, the lesbian egg, the dyke egg,

They dared to dream of finer things:
a miniature coach set in a jeweled egg.

the n.b. egg, the bitter egg, the cracked egg, the egg that all the horses and men
could not reform again, no matter how deeply they prayed and prayed.

I miss tea eggs from the convenience store:
a vat of liquid, warm pebble in hand.

II.

It’s less a kink and more a tenderness: how the shell, when broken, resembles
the fissured earth of a dried creek, from which the sandpipers have left in search of

Their perfect O-shaped mouths could not have known
the taste from inside the egg—rich and dark.

softer soils. It is evening, the sun smeared across the low sky like drag, and you hold
my hand, ask why it is that all the queers we’ve met have had a birdwatching phase,

Although they tried to save the jellyfish,
it lay shapeless as a scoop of steamed egg.

a hiking phase, a horse girl phase, a nature-doesn’t-care-who-I-fuck phase. I laugh,
wondering: if the price of passage to this world is that we can only be wild geese

From grape country to dim sum cart, here comes
three mouth-watering egg-yolk jelly tarts.

in theory, then theory might be our way out of this mess, our chance to speculate
ourselves into a future of metamorphosis, of alkaline transformations, to dream

At the market, foam crates of century
eggs—protected, ready for consumption.

of finer things: a jeweled horizon, bedazzled by a murmuration of starlings.
We walk into the long days of the convenience store and you pick a paper bag

How best to cherish the bad egg, floating
in water? Crack the shell? Let loose the rot?

of quail eggs to press into my hands, cold as fistfuls of creek pebbles, and I take
them as if they’re not already dead: please, stay warm, I say to you, I say to them.

No matter how deeply they prayed and prayed,
the chick would not return into the egg.