Tipped brushes stipple thick glaze onto these canvassed chickenskins. Farther into the butcher's house, a man dressed in woolen smoke beats ribbed slabs, breaking muscle to kernels by fist. A white smock with drabble in the creases walks, and falls with a lump in mid-murk—the grated area only navigable by the glints that hiss in spaced braziers below. Cooking oil drabbed in a wrist-flick over these grates, the smoke rises to shake the spraying hand; sidling beside, it shames your hairs, and tests your skin; crisses it with black glitt’ring lips. Lungs grow longer, and drop out of your mouth; they proceed by stages and learn to breathe coal.
Oil he slaps on thin strips, he lifts the two rubber handles—and a thick knife he draws between the hinds of the tied-up men, for a cook-up to thick the best arteries into pipe. The oil nozzle from basement connection into a tank like a man’s shoulder, and first extension of arm, girded pissy-perfect, a headache of deviated planes and flaked paints. This oil, compounded from pressed vegetables and thistles, is a dull amber-gold; so he applies successive coats to his hand and glad-hands you, getting his thumb to pop from your navel. Brushing the obtained chicken skins with a sauce of ginger and split pigeon peas, that butcher tempts forth the fluttering gorge.
-2001
