“Home to Roost”

Home to Roost

By Kay Ryan


The chickens
are circling and
blotting out the
day. The sun is
bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,
the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.
They turn and
then they turn
again. These
are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small-
various breeds.
Now they have
come home
to roost — all
the same kind
at the same speed.



We see “chickens” “circling” around and around. Most of the lines have only one or two beats. Are we seeing a tornado of some sort here?

The chickens
are circling and

The first line starts off with an upward movement, with an offbeat, a beat, then an offbeat again, moving the rhythm down. The next line repeats the previous line’s rhythm. But here, two offbeats follow the beat in “CIRcling”. Things get even faster on the next line, the third, with more offbeats, three, following “blot”.

Depending on how you see the first line, “The chickens” could be a single syntactic unit, a subject, making “chickens” stand out more as an end-stop. Or “chickens” could be an enjambement, a run-on, if you feel the line is not complete syntactically until you include a verbal clause, “are circling”.

blotting out the
day. The sun is

The beat is at the fore (BLOTing), with more offbeats after it, three. At the next line this rhythm seems to be repeated, except that the second offbeat is replaced with a beat, at “sun”. So, you have now the first of a two-beat line, with a caesura. After this pause, the offbeat, beat, offbeat rhythm of the new sentence echoes the first line. It is established: you are seeing a “circling”.

bright, but the
chickens are in
the way. Yes,

The B in the first two words echoes the B of “blotting”. The next line repeats the pattern of line 3, also establishing a connection to “blotting”.

“the way. Yes,” echoes the pattern of line 4, with a pausing. “way” rhymes with “day”, to point you to the similar patterning, both having a similar full-stop and caesura following them. “again. These”, further down the lines, repeats this patterning, especially that of “the way. Yes,”, for the final time. You’ll also see these lines running shorter and shorter, in word count. Just picture the “circling” chickens against the “bright” sun forming a top-heavy vortex.

the sky is dark
with chickens,
dense with them.

“the sky is dark” pauses or slows the whirling movement. Its regular rhythm (offbeat, beat, offbeat, beat) and the long vowels in the two beats slow things down to make you notice the sky becoming dark and dense with chickens. Because the full-stop punctuation signals an end-stop, “them” receives a little stressing or a beat. “dense” rhymes with “them”, forming a circle.

They turn and
then they turn
again. These

Rhyming abounds, to make the circling motif more patent here, with “turn”, “they”, and lots of TH and T alliteration. “and”, at the end of the line, repeats an earlier “and”, at the end of the second line.

are the chickens
you let loose
one at a time
and small-
various breeds.

Still more rhyming, with “loose” and “roost”; “breeds” and, later, “speed”; and “same”. “chickens” has been repeated four times: from “all” four corners of the world?

Now they have
come home
to roost — all
the same kind
at the same speed.

Offbeats have been utilized for all three words of “Now they have”, if you do not stress “Now”. The speed of that line is then cut so suddenly with “come home”, where there is some near-rhyming. Also, note the sameness in spelling, with c an h (part of the spelling in "chickens") before the repeated "ome". There is practically no offbeats if you read both words with stress. The long vowels and the slowed pace here bring you to "to roost", with a dash and "all". The whirling now finally slows down with the D baulking in long vowels in “kind” and “speed”, foreshadowed by “breeds”, earlier.

Those last four lines sum up the poem. This is about the “various breeds” (races?) of “chickens” (people?), coming “home” (the US?) to “roost” (settle down?), “all” the “same kind” under the “sun”.


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62-year old Fairfax English teacher Kay Ryan is America’s 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2008 and 2009.

Kay, a lesbian, took home $100,000 for US’s biggest poetry award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2004. She has a bachelor's and a master's degree from UCLA. Grove Press published her collection Elephant Rocks in 1996. Her new one, New and Selected Poems, will be out in the US this November.

Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in Pushcart Prizes anthologies. Her other awards include 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, a 2001 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 2000 Union League Poetry Prize and the Maurice English Poetry Award.

Visitors to the Central Park Zoo in New York City can see here poem How Birds Sing on top of a retaining wall for children to play on.

"Mary at the Tattoo Shop"

Mary at the Tattoo Shop
by Marcus Jackson


She counted her money
before we went in,
avenue beside us anxious
with Friday-evening traffic.
Both fourteen, we shared a Newport,
its manila butt salty to our lips.
Inside, from a huge book
of designs and letter styles,
she chose to get “MARY”
in a black, Old English script
on the back of her neck.
The guy who ran the shop
leaned over her for forty minutes
with a needled gun
that buzzed loud
as if trying to get free.
He took her twenty-five dollars
then another ten
for being under age.
Back outside, the sun
dipped behind rooftops,
about to hand the sky over to night.
Lifting her hazel hair,
she asked me to rub
some A&D ointment
on her new tattoo;
my finger glistened in salve
as I reached for her swollen name.




The title, with the name "Mary", smacks of other whimsical titles, like Alice in Wonderland, or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. What’s in a name? What does it tell of someone? Particularly of someone with a "swollen name”.

Mary is probably not her name. She just opted for it, is all. And, she wanted it tattooed onto the back of her neck, not in colour, but in “black”, and not in some modern lettering but in “Old English script”. All this underpins an innocence, some retreat into tradition or some old fashion. But “black” spells a corruption of this. Throughout there is an aura of darkness, of something sinister, in this poem. “Friday-evening traffic” and “black” prepare us, later, for “the sun/dipped behind rooftops,/about to hand the sky over to night”.

Lines 1 to 4 effect a double entendre. There is an impression of something illicit, layered, like a tattoo, over an innocent act of counting money. The third and fourth lines, of a street full of vehicles passing, whose drivers are ‘anxious’, could well give the first impression of some payment for services, from people like those unseen drivers.

Another such layering, like the “tattoo” over the underage girl’s skin, can be seen in the lines from “The guy who ran the shop” to “for being under age.” Here, there is an indication of danger in “needled gun” and “trying to get free”. Standing by themselves these lines, this “tattoo”, can also be seen as if this is some pimp brandishing a weapon, usurping more than his share of some girl’s business.

Below this “tattoo”, line five assures us that this female is, after all, just a teenager, a child already past pubescence. The sexual connotations of the next line (“butt salty to our lips”) tell us she is on the onset – or the “lip” - of adulthood. Other sexual innuendos, like “rub”, “finger glistened in salve”, “her swollen name”, “leaned over her for forty minutes”, compound this.

Money is broached from the first line, its positioning right at the end of the line giving it prominence as an end-stopped word. “Money” concretizes into “twenty-five dollars” and “ten”. Further down the lines, there are several instances of counting, of numbers: “counted her money”, “fourteen”, “forty minutes”, “ten”, “under age”. This is like a countdown to something, a passing of time - a passing of innocence.

This poem appears in this July’s edition of The New Yorker.