Skip to main content

My Steak Poem



Steak
Steak makes me feel
I am an animal.
I become aware of my teeth,
My marrow,
That my jaws are bones,
The potential of my flesh.
I forget what it cost to get steak.
Meat is a thing to me
Alone.
A cow is a thing to me
Apart.
I cannot mourn a thing I never saw,
A thing that makes me visible.
When I think back to the places I have been,
Where steaks are raised to die,
My nostrils flare in protest
Of the stench of a fecal mixing bowl:
Larger than my neighborhood,
Deep enough to creep over the edge of my boot,
A horror I cannot bring inside to meet my wife.
So I enter barefoot into the grilling place.
The gaseous corps of a steak,
Oozing green, delicious to flies
Makes me feel
I am an animal.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Review of David Tennant's Hamlet

He That Increaseth Knowledge Increaseth Sorrow : How Hamlet Demonstrates That Conscience does Make Cowards of Us All  It is among the most pleasurable, and the most maddening, enterprises in life to read The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. Pleasurable because of its inexhaustible depth, its perfect turns of phrase, and its expansion of the art form that is the English language. Maddening because of the impenetrable layers of madness throughout the text, and within its many characters. At the end of the play, one is left feeling that something profound has been said, but that one is powerless to reiterate what it was. In Stephen Greenblatt’s seminal treatment of Hamlet he identified eleven essential unanswered questions in the play, among which are, “Why does Hamlet delay avenging the murder of his father by Claudius, his father’s brother? How much guilt does Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude . . . bear in this crime? How trustworthy is the ghost of Ha...
3 comments
Read more

Conference Recap Part 4: From Now On It's Us and Them (Hymn 258)

Our Great Leader, who is Jesus ,      Not Elohim, but Yahweh, Please don’t kill, don’t maim, or cleave us,      We’re with you and not with “they”      Here’s the chorus of this war song           Here is where we pledge to fight      With our president who’ll speak next           Against all he says aren’t right Why are hymns so bathed in bloodshed;      Why the battle metaphors Why not sing of beauty instead      Why do You hate peace not wars?      Here’s the battle chorus once more           Belief is a flag we fly      Those young men who knock on your door           Preach with Vader, “Join or die!” (Starts at 2:53:17) Every Conference you remind us      That our loved ones are at ri...
7 comments
Read more

The Tedious Web That is The Book of Mormon

     I set out on this project as a gift for my dad. Growing up there was nothing he and I bonded over more than our mutual love for The Book of Mormon. I have since left the faith in which he raised me, so he has a difficult time understanding me these days. With monumental recent additions to the literary scholarship surrounding The Book of Mormon, I thought it would round some edges between us if I could advocate for the book to be taken seriously within academia. This seemed like it would be easy to do. As a believer I read it many times and had positive experiences with the text, which I think have made me a better person. Also, instead of literary reviews coming out of Brigham Young University exclusively, serious Mormon Studies scholarship is now published in the presses of Oxford, University of North Carolina, and Yale. So, I caught up on the best and most current secondary scholarship and began a fresh read of the text. Let me show you what I found. Since few...
Post a Comment
Read more