So I'm going to read--
I'm going to read four sections from,
I guess, like a book-length type thing
that I've been working on.
That's still very much a work in progress.
It's called "The Kill Floor" and it
follows the lives of nine different people who
work in a slaughterhouse, and uses the architecture of a kill
floor which kind of conceals and sanitizes
labor, as well as just the lives in the memories of the workers.
It sort of interrogates the different proximities
of harmfulness like institutional,
social, personal, as well as the capacity for humanization
among the dehumanization that saturates our communities
in that community.
What I'm reading from is just from a character named Lenny.
He's an indexer and a hand knocker,
which means that he spaces the cattle on the racks
and has other duties as well.
But Lenny's labor-- there's Lenny's labor,
and then there's who Lenny is, and this poem
spends a lot of time in his childhood,
thinking about his brothers and his mother, anything else
you need to know?
Lenny's deeply Catholic, and he has a collection of holy cards.
His wife is named Helen.
All right.
This is from "The Kill Floor."
And when it drops like a magician's failed
reveal, the tablecloth clumsy, ruins the good china with it,
the skin crumples wildly, bouncing
lively, like a kid's rubber ball against kitchen tile.
The whole damn scaffold shudders, the gambrel steel
alarming in its cold.
Its quake, a thoughtless reflex.
My twine already tying up the ankles--
are they ankles?
In a triple knot.
Sometimes, by mistake, I touch a hoof
instead of the metal guiding track.
It's always smooth before I send it down.
I want to draw it close, press my forehead to its flimsy hawk,
and sway with the only song I ever really learned by heart.
If I could only touch the hem of his garment.
But Stan sends down the next batch from the knocking box.
Dress, we call it.
Stripping the sheep, a simple un-creation.
They resemble any inside--
featureless and half formed.
The tongue truly still a tongue in any mouth or maw.
Blameless, our aprons stippled with blood,
a nudge from the head like a metronome, beating,
beating, just above our knees, our stomachs, if they're young.
I'd watch mom clutch her rosary, her prayer
a delicate procedure.
The joyful mysteries on Monday, whole afternoons
hung on her final hallelujah.
The beads bandaging her palm until her whole hand
would loosen, and she'd eye the jangling strands, sort
their rattle for God's utterance.
There's this sound when a skull has
been saw shaved open that Freddy likes to joke about at lunch.
It's just like sanding down a coffee table.
Feels unnatural at first, but go with the grain
and you get the hang of it.
Between two big bites, Freddy crushes
his soda can or does the crossword in felt-tipped pen.
Most days, I don't even eat until I'm home.