The Butcher’s Bard
The Butcher is as aware as anyone else that this month, April, is poetry month. New York magazine knows this too, and in inimitable form, it tells the tale of the tape, as if they were boxers, of the two poets who became the first-ever winners to share share a National Book Award jointly: Juan Felipe Herrera and August Kleinzahler. Our money is on Kleinzahler. If only because he wrote a poem named “Meat.” (He also once suggested that the U.S. government break terrorists by forcing them to listen to Garrison Keillor reading poetry.)
After the jump, “Meat“
Meat
by August Kleinzahler
How much meat moves
Into the city each night
The decks of its bridges tremble
In the liquefaction of sodium light
And the moon a chemical orange
Semitrailers strain their axles
Shivering as they take the long curve
Over warehouses and lofts
The wilderness of streets below
The mesh of it
With Joe on the front stoop smoking
And Louise on the phone with her mother
Out of the haze of industrial meadows
They arrive, numberless
Hauling tons of dead lamb
Bone and flesh and offal
Miles to the ports and channels
Of the city’s shimmering membrane
A giant breathing cell
Exhaling its waste
From the stacks by the river
And feeding through the night
