Growing up in a family that owned a meat company
I mistook for most of my early years the meaning
of the word MEETING. When a parent abandoned me
to go to work, to a meeting, I envisioned adults standing
among great piles of marbled flesh, observing it,
discussing it, kneading it with their selfish hands.
WE ARE MEATING! I imagined them saying to each other,
all at once, together, without me. MEATING! MEATING!
Sometimes people would unzip their skins
to become more meat, enhancing the meating’s purpose,
and sometimes with a blade they’d transfer a chunk
of themselves onto the pile while wearing a smile as wide
as the one I wear when I gather now in the name
of work with other workers around a table to exchange
mostly empty speech, and this phantasmagoria returns,
and nothing that I see before me changes.