What surprises me most about the egg cleanse is that every time I touch the egg to my heart I start to cry, and I find myself saying aloud my poor heart! like it’s the chick from the egg hatched into a magpie, crouched against a garden wall not yet able to fly. I feel so much for it, this fledgling, so neatly harlequined, so almost become itself, though it would gut a nest of robins if it could. I think of the energy expended on all of it; the gestation and cracking of a blue egg, the slow feathering of a bird, and for what?  Ravenous little hearts skulking in every corner, their blood thrashing around frail circulatory systems, their endings taking place out of sight.