About the Meat

Dinner at our house

Was always about the meat

My father loved steak and rare

Roast beef

Poke it with your finger

It seems to be alive somehow

Rubbery blubbery not quite ripe

I’d take my fork and knife

Slice into the flesh

Red would run

Like a river of regret

Pooling next to the boiled carrots

Staining mashed potatoes pink

You’d really have to load it up

With salt and pepper

Maybe Worcestershire or

A1 to make it taste good

To mask what it really was

You were eating

What was it we were eating?

I’d seen those butcher shop charts

A great big cow with dotted lines

Drawn on its side

Little countries on the continent of beef

Shank, Flank, Rib, Sir Loin

And all the rest

All those loose ends and crunchy bits

They’d grind up into something called

Chuck, ground Chuck

I knew a guy named Chuck once

And couldn’t say his name

Without thinking of a meat grinder

So I grew up at dinner

Like a man, a little man

I learned to eat the animals

They killed to feed our tribe

Of course I never knew them by their names

Names like Chuck

Although today I could imagine

A butcher shop chart

With the parts of my friend Chuck

Defined in dotted lines

Was it that easy to forget

These were living breathing feeling beings?

There are those that say

Eating meat, the flesh of animals

Killed for our pleasure

Is the first step toward war

I don’t know about that

I do know dinner at our house

Was all about the meat

I can still see my knife

Separating the flesh

The blood running red on my dinner plate

Note:  This poem was written in Nancy Aronie’s Chilmark Writers Workshop. I have since learned that chuck is properly a shoulder cut, though the term has been loosely used to make ground beef sound more appealing. My friend Chuck, however, was not harmed in the writing of this poem.