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Click the play button below to listen to Chera Hammons read “Classroom Hatch.”

My husband tells me every chick his fifth graders
took home last year died cruelly:

crushed by younger siblings
or drowned after falling into

a basin of water. One timid girl’s dog
swallowed her chick whole

the moment she set it down,
believing it to be an offering.

This year we have already
had enough of senseless loss.

So he brings the chicks home,
and in our fragrant kitchen

we can hear them chirp, chirp, chirp
from their plastic bin in the garage. Asking for what?

They flee to the corners when we feed them,
trembling and trilling loudly in alarm.

When I was little, I had a duckling
that slept in my lap while I read,

and later I had a white rabbit kit
I carried with me in a sock

when my mother went into the houses
of the wealthy to do their ironing.

They used to ask her to salt the snails
that lived behind their cool green hedges, too,

and she would. We are all set into a day
that we can’t live beyond, and I know this.

I try to feed the chicks mealworms from my hands,
crouching there sometimes for hours.

I can’t remember how
to make them believe in kindness.