Bone by bone, breast by breast, 

feather by feather, chest by chest 

The butcher plucks his stock each spring, 

he flours the dough and gathers guts in his sling, 

the country he feeds, a family of pigs, 

pale pink and hungry and skinny as twigs, 

a sprig of meat pie for his sister, a heap for his brother, 

a vat for his father, a mass for his mother.

The butcher is cutting, hunting the old and the sick, 

he harvests lamb’s organs, swollen and thick. 

Ulcers and fear grow deep in the bellies of prey, 

of the people who were starved and beaten away. 

The bones of their grandparents, their mothers, and kin 

pressed under layers of parchment paper and sins. 

We eat the people we caught, the people we found, 

we proudly eat the cuts our butcher sliced by the pound,

on plates of china or glass, paper or silk, 

bathtubs of salt, blood, and sugar, 

or silver pitchers of milk. 

A conveyor belt hums with fresh ribbons wrapped rare,

cuts of ripe filet fed fotter, handled with care, 

The butcher’s table was a fountain of youth, 

the blood of a nation, nail by nail, tooth by tooth, 

The fresh meat of lost bodies black and stabbed in the back, 

buried under the table, we choke down our new batch. 

When a wolf gobbles his last duck, a fox his last goose, 

will he starve like Hansel in his caged candy roof? 

A wh*re for a wh*re, a saint for a saint 

may our plates be licked clean before it’s too late.