If you have to say something Poem by Ester Naomi Perquin

If you have to say something about meat you say ‘this'. This is the part
that has no eyes and no name, that didn't spend days on end
walking around on boggy grass, that you even
waved at when you were little.

Someone sticks the point of a knife in the back of your hand, someone
attacks you, someone asks for your heart as if that's something
that belongs on the table and you decide you'd better
make a joke of it. No one laughs.

It's only when you've had too much to drink that you tell the story
of the meat as it really was. You would like to include a farmer
with a double-barreled shotgun, a smoke house full of wood.

But you talk about a screen, a panel with three buttons, the winch,
the advertising man who wanted to make love to his wife
in the middle of the night and then thought
of the perfect slogan.

Brainwaves, you say, are apparently easy to come by when it's right
in front of your nose. When you really bury yourself in it.
Nobody wants to get into that at the moment.