Tuesday Poem - Sky Burial by Ali Alizadeh

Sky Burial

for John Kinsella

I really want to be fed

to vultures when I’m dead. My toddler

on the verge of using spoon

will be assigned to serve, when I’m done

his father’s cadaver, sliced and spread

to sky’s black scavengers. Why not

– my wife often asks – cremation

à la her desired dissemination

of charred fragments in the breeze

wreathing a mountain range? I answer

and confess. To a lifetime of feasting

on birds. (She’s baffled, a vegetarian

alien to guilt accumulated

in the gullet of a carnivore hooked

on the thighs, breast and wings

of the avian.) A concatenation

of culinary memories. Chicken

kebab: grilled squares stabbed

onto a bayonet-like skewer

at my uncle’s wedding just before

the War. Poultry so scarce in Tehran

the viscous taste became a hunger

for an end to Saddam’s bombing raids

and when Mum did somehow bring home

a frozen, beige clump and cooked us

khoresht baadenjan with morgh

the other three in the family gave me

– without my comprehending

the complexity of their munificence –

all the tender, fatless, skinless fillets

and I devoured. When we finally fled

the acerbic scent (‘secret herbs, spices’)

of cheap deep-fried flesh, vital

emblem of the American empire

galvanised my senses upon arrival

in Australia. Chiko Rolls at the tuck shop

(made with mutton, I later discovered,

despite the name) diverted, occasionally

from the howls – “Speak English!

Say something, camel fucker!” – and then

smoking with a surfie dope-dealer

who worked at Red Rooster between art

classes at university. I lived off

bread, baked beans and starchy noodles

but for a treat – to recover

from rejections by girls, ridicule by lecturers

who found my thoughts and paintings

pointless – I’d resort to a sodden

marked down BBQ chook

wilting below the deli counter, late

at night in a Gold Coast supermarket

biting the singed bird’s sinews

with terrible anger. Finally I left

for Melbourne to ‘make it’ as a poet

and to locate a hypothetical woman

who’d tolerate me. When I did find her

I also found (to my gastronomic

terror) she was a vegetarian. The end

of my fetish for feathered beasts? Hardly

could you call her a proselytiser

but what a traveller. Honeymoon

in Vietnam: tofu tossed with lemongrass

for her, pieces of quails and other murdered

birds decked my chopsticks. In China

I struggled to order without

embarrassment at the restaurants

since ‘chicken’ in Mandarin

distanced by one tonal accent from

‘prostitute’. And so on. Tavuk

shish kebabs in Istanbul, turkey strips

(ersatz bacon) in Dubai. Can this

addiction be assuaged by the virtues

of ethical consumerism, barnyard

fowls? My wife looks away. The truth

hurts even more because what’s wasted

on feeding me meat becomes heat

and melts the world. And I had

a pet rooster once, regal with his red crown

fierce after the targeted killing of my

sister’s speckled hen by one of Tehran’s

infamous crows. I can still hear

my rooster’s sad, lonesome howl

creep out of his quivering beak

when I enjoy murgh tikka masala (or shamefully

for an anti-capitalist, a Zinger). I cringe

past the glistening corpses of Beijing ducks

but my mouth moistens. So please

a secular sky burial for me. A machete

doing the work of maggots’ teeth

on my dead body. And proffer the chops

to the vultures to apologise for a lifetime

of eating their kind. Aquiline beaks

tearing morsels of my muscles

and then tenderised and regurgitated

for frenetic, squawking chicks.