to squeal, like a housewife shittin over a new

television, I danced into the kitchen

and peeled the plasticaul off, and lifted

the top slice, from its condomy ring of

casing made of the alimentary

canal of a pig,

and pressed the soft flesh up through it

and squirted a curly tail of mustard on it

and crushed the first luscious mouthful

onto my hard and soft palates with my strenuous tongue,

tasting the lips and livers and bacons

and gristles and fats, as if I was

delectating an enemy’s offal,

meanwhile capering and squeaking, feeling the

salt and animal sugar and protein

blossom into my arteries,

the trimmings and crushings of Hog’s Pudding.

My father’s father’s father was

a pig farmer, I don’t know if he

prepared the ancient Roman delicacy pig vulva, I think he did not,

though he and his wife and his seven children were

starving, slowly, and when Childe 8,

Albert Asa, to the dark cabin came

from his mother, the newborn’s father went to the

attic and ended his own life. And here I was

prancing in the quarantine to be

eating flesh of my flesh again,

devouring the plush dote-mum like a breast,

my trotters capering, my hoofs clicking on the floor.

I know about the animal packing houses

and the warming and melting of the earth, and yet I

cabrioled with meat lust like a demon

frenzying on the coffin lid of our world.

At last I am confessional,

at the time of have-not, I look at myself in this mirror.

Quarantine Fast

Today, I decided to fast, enter into a

collaboration with my fat—I will burn it,

it will give me its saved-up mayonnaise energy and white-frosting energy.

You know how the palms make the sign of an hourglass figure,

out for the breasts, in for the waist, out for the hips,

like a two-handed descent of a shapely body,

that’s how my torso looks now, but with several curves out and in—

T, and belly, and saddlebags, and A—

a big candle left lit to sag down onto a dish,

as if I were Artemis of Ephesus,

multiple mammaries, not just in front,

but all around,

though some antiquarians say those are not tits but

bulls’ testicles, or female lions’ heads, what the

hell, I don’t care if they are lakes of fat or

Books of Kells of fat, I say they are old girls’ things, they are like

eyes which weep milk,

and like the five huge rolls of hay—two over three—

which a truck takes by my window most days now, south to north.

I want to go back to being the shape of a tall chimney, with a few

loose bricks,

some wobble on top and some wobble on the bottom,

I want to be mesomorphic like St. Augustine,

denial of chocolate, denial of the Nile wine

they drank from the paps of papyrus cups,

and St. A. would tell his stallion stories.

And later today maybe I could cook a little kale—