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Volume 2 Number 2 • Fall - Winter 2010-2011
The world is made of meat-sliced walking,
making do with mayonnaise and chit-chat:
talk like soggy clods of lint from pockets washed.
In the markets, subways: women hawking
fists and fingerfuls of animal fat.
They carry on in meat-sliced walking,
egg-eyed scavengers of schoolroom Lost
& Founds, (teeth for boot tips, tit for tat) –
talking soggy clods from pockets washed.
Listen – now the meat men are all cocking
meat heads, elbows, thumbs in butter pats.
They're dressing for their meat-sliced walking,
stocking-feet well greased through tossed
coleslaw & corned beef britches, béarnaise sauced vast
bodies dense as lint from pockets washed.
Around me: thick-skinned meat men gawking,
haunches, raw hides, eyeballs cast
askance and ogling my meat-sliced walking,
all my talking lost, or lost, or lost.
Harmony Button earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Utah in 2007. Her work has appeared in Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism & Translation, AfterImage Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Prick of the Spindle and other literary publications. In 2006, she was awarded the Larry Levis Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She currently teaches English and History at The Waterford School in Sandy, UT.