The Living Teaching

You wanted to be a butcher but they made you be a lawyer. You brought home presents when it was nobody’s birthday. Smashed platters of meat she cut against the grain. Were a kind of portable shrine — I was supposed to cultivate a field of  bliss, then return to my ordinary mind. You burned the files and moved the office. Made your children fear a different school. Liked your butter hard and your candy frozen. Were a kind of diamond drill, drilling a hole right through my skull — quality sleep, late November. What did it mean, “field of bliss” — A sky alive “with your greatest mentor” — I wore your shoes, big as boats, flopped through the house — while you made garlic eggs with garlic salt, what “represents the living teaching” — Sausages on toasted rye with a pickle, and a smother of cheese, and frosting right out of  the can without the cake — You ruled with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, you raged at my stony mother, while I banged from my high chair, waving the bloodied bone of something slaughtered — I was a butcher’s daughter. So all hail to me — Os Gurges, Vortex Mouth, I gap my craw and the bakeries of the cities fall, I stomp the docks — spew out a bullet stream of oyster shells, I’ll drain the seas — the silos on every farm, the rice from the paddy fields, the fruit from all the orchard trees, and then I’ll eat the trees — I’ll eat with money and I’ll eat with my teeth until the rocks and the mountains curl and my blood sings — I’m such a good girl to eat the world.