cheap eats

by l.e. leone

Say hay!

THINGS FOUND WHILE Searching for a Needle in a Haystack: A clothespin. A small red bead. Some blue string. Another clothespin. White spray tip from an aerosol can. A needle, but not the one I was looking for. Triangular scrap of metal, sharp and shiny. Plastic lid (green). Hay. Hay. Hay. Hay. Hay. Loads and loads of chicken shit.

And, of course, the above poem, which is not a poem so much as a scientific paper, impeccably researched and unbiasedly presented. I think all my poems now will be scientific papers. Hopefully one day I will have graduate students to assist with the research, squabble over the order in which their names appear on the paper, and just generally keep me company.

Lard knows I could have used the help with this one. If you could have seen the chicken farmer, camp shovel and bucket in hand, sifting through shit (very very literally), looking for his or her favorite earring, lost one day while cleaning out the chicken coop ... I was crying out of one eye and laughing with the other one – laughing because I couldn't believe I was actually doing it, actually looking for an actual needle, more or less, in an actual haystack, more or less.

Actually, there were two haystacks: the henhouse floor, and the compost pile where all the straw and shit gets dumped when I clean out the coop. Would you believe I went through both of them? Would you believe that, undaunted and in the name of science, the paper writing itself now not in my head but in a collection of found objects in my jacket pocket, I crawled on my hands and knees between the two haystacks, eye-Geigering for something shiny in a sheet of rusty redwood needles and dull driveway stones?

I didn't have graduate students, but I do have my chickens, who are most excellent archaeologists. So even after I finally gave up on finding my beloved earring, I did not give up on them one day excavating it. If not, then not; and if so, then all I had to do was go around with my eyes open, which is basically what my life boils down to anyway these days. Going around with my eyes open.

You wouldn't believe the things that chickens'll turn up, scratching the surface of the planet out there all day every day. Or maybe you will believe it once you read our forthcoming scientific paper/found poem "Things the Chicken Farmer's Chickens Have Turned Up," by Chicky, Chicky, Chicky, Chicky, Chicky, and the Chicken Farmer.

Anyway, all this was weeks and weeks ago, before the rains came and washed all my hopes away. But I couldn't forget about the earring. I tried wearing its partner by itself, and then I hung it up like a retired number on the outfield fence and tried my hand at emotional recovery, picking the brains of my genetically female friends: "What do you do when you lose an all-time favorite earring?"

"Find it."

"Give up."

"Go shopping."

I wrote the first paragraph of this column in my journal and was only reminded of it recently when I came home from the feed store with a bale of straw in the back of my pickup truck. I wondered what one might find, needles notwithstanding, in this stack of hay. I also wondered how I was going to keep it dry, since my storage shed leaks and my carport floods.

One thing I have is 55-gallon oil drums. I decided to push two of them together under the carport roof, next to the chicken coop, and set the straw on top of the drums. As I was moving the first drum, I thought, wouldn't it be funny and fun to find my earring under it? I even bent down and looked. Nothing. I started to move the second drum, without thinking anything, without looking, really, until something silvery in the crud caught my eye.

The earring!

Did you hear me whoop? This would have been, let's see, the day before Thanksgiving, like 3, 3:30? No? You were out of town. Well, now that you're back ... like finding hay in a haystack, there seems to be no end to great Vietnamese restaurants in the Tenderloin. If you don't tend to go for the divey, down-and-dirty joints I so love, check out the shaking beef, for example, at this great shiny clean one:

Mangosteen. 601 Larkin (at Eddy), SF. (415) 776-3999. Tues.-Sat., 9 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sun., 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Takeout available. No alcohol. Credit cards not accepted. Wheelchair accessible. E-mail L.E. Leone at le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com.