American Meat.

By d.

how it comes of blood.

how it comes of bleeding.

meat.

american meat.

how it comes with feeling.

like you eat the way the slaughterhouse felt/feels.

it’s in the meat, like a secret

ingredient the FDA doesn’t wanna talk about. and it becomes you. and u wonder, y am

i so sad?

u go 2 the dr.

and you trust what comes in an orange plastic bottle with a nice white paper label and
directions for use in the typography of impartial findings.

slowly, your systems get confused-‐-‐is that cancer, some disease, or just another
expectation of me?

don’t be embarrassed. they’ll clean your bedpans, mop up the blood you come of, open
you and brace you open, and cut out of you the stuff you’re made of, throw it out, a barf
of surgery. you’re just hunks of made the easy way. and your funeral is the big show.

or someday, language will say these things. and we’ll see ourselves in its mirror like
things we never stood for.

like another war, and another war.

death before the bastard’s innocence.

Forgiveness?

like emptiness. like arduousness and emptiness, trying and trying and emptiness, and
trying and trying and trying and emptiness, and trying and trying and trying and trying…
and emptiness.

look!-‐-‐a dot.

or peephole.

animals!

cobra, phoenix, amoeba. mule deer, monkey, bee, moth, mammoth, giraffe, wolf-‐-‐ different things in different spaceships. be made, remade of cantaloupe and cucumbers,
of avocado and almonds, nuts and kale and flax seed, kelp and tomatoes and sea salt and lettuce and cayenne pepper.

robot and his monkey brother.

and lo!-‐-‐the sun doth riseth, a wailing, wasted ball of drunken water on fire, less
idealism, merely, and the ponderosa’s sap is hot and flowing, it flows, in the sunlight
glowing, and the mosquito is fat on blood and on the ponderosa napping when-‐-‐poor mwah-‐skweet-‐O!-‐-‐he is trapped in hot drip of sap avalanche and preserved for 40 million years.

d. is a graduate of the University of California, Davis and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. d.’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tattoo Highway, Fringe, The Collagist, Orion Headless, Birkensnake, and other places. d. lives on the river in Portland, Oregon.