I’ve been bred fine, Mr. President. Finer than the rest. When the light comes up over the pens, it strikes my feathers like a torch, and I know it is not the sun but the world itself come to see me. They say a bird cannot understand destiny, but they never met a bird with mirrors for eyes. I have looked upon my own reflection in the metal of the trough and seen greatness staring back.
The others think of corn. I think of legacy.
They cluck and gossip about the day’s feed. I think of the table. Of the silver laid out like a promise. Of the man whose name rings in the air like thunder over dry land. Donald J. Trump. I say it slowly, like a prayer. There is power in the syllables, heavy and shaped by history. The handlers speak of him as if he were weather itself, vast and inevitable, and I reckon that’s true enough. You can’t fight the weather. You can only rise into it or be buried by it.
I have watched him on the screen they keep in the office shed. The way he stands there, chin high, as if the very act of breathing is an achievement. I know that stance. I was born with it. When I walk the yard, the others part before me. They sense the largeness, the gravity. The same thing people sense when he walks into a room. Two creatures made of the same strange stuff, carved out of pride and appetite.
You look at me, sir, and you see yourself. Don’t deny it. You like the big ones, the beautiful ones, the winners. I’m the biggest bird on this side of the fence. No lean, sad bird here. I am the great American body, full of corn and consequence.
They say you stand before the nation each year and spare one of my kind. That you touch its neck with your hand and grant it life. A miracle in the season of slaughter. I think of that moment often. But I do not wish the pardon. Mercy is for those who fear the end. I was born for the table. Your table. I want to go down in history, bronzed and fragrant, the centerpiece of your feast. Let the small ones live. I would rather die magnificently than survive unnoticed.
At night, I dream of the banquet. I imagine you there in your dark suit, your hair catching the light like wheat at harvest. I imagine the guests leaning close as you carve me, the knife gliding through my flesh as though it were destiny being portioned out. They will ask what it tastes like, and you will say, Tremendous. And it will be true.
They tell stories about you, Mr. President. How you turned dust into empire, failure into spectacle. How you could sell the desert a handful of its own sand, and it would thank you for the privilege. I believe every word. For I, too, have lived by spectacle. When I spread my wings, the yard falls silent. The others stare. Even the sky seems to pause, caught between wonder and envy. I know what that feels like, to be both admired and hated for the same reason: that you exist larger than the space you are given.
There was a storm once, last winter. The wind tore through the pens, and the younger birds screamed and fled for shelter. I stood in the open. The rain came down like knives, and I spread my wings to it. I thought then of you, how they say you face the world with no umbrella, only the conviction that it cannot touch you. I let the rain strike me until I felt it not as pain but as proof. The weak survive by hiding. The great endure by being seen.
I have heard men speak of humility, of gratitude, of knowing one’s place. They say such things as if they were virtues. But the truth, sir, is that the world does not remember the humble; it remembers what fills its belly and what fills its headlines. You understand that instinctively. You have lived your whole life as an act of consumption—of land, of attention, of air. I consume as well. Corn, light, the gaze of men. We are appetites given form.
They think me foolish for wanting this. For desiring the knife. But there is a kind of immortality in being devoured by power. To feed the king is to join him. To pass into his body, his legend, his myth. I would rather be a single mouthful of greatness than a lifetime of mediocrity.
The blood in me hums with ceremony. I hear the handlers coming in the morning with their clipboards and their talk of selection, and I stand taller, my chest swelling against the wire. Choose me, I whisper. Choose me, Mr. President. Let the cameras flash and the people cheer. Let the knives gleam beneath the chandeliers. Let the children gasp at the size of me. Let them say this was the bird that fed a nation.
For when the plates are cleared and the bones are picked clean and the silence settles like snow, they will remember me. They will remember you. The man and the meal. The show and the substance. Two great American beasts who understood what it meant to be magnificent—and consumed.
