Free The Hungry Ear by Kevin Young

umpteen
pounds lighter & a lot
less alive. You stuck
round my ribs even
when I treated you like a dog
dirty, I dare not eat.
I know you’re the blues
because loving you
may kill me—but still you
rock me down slow
as hamhocks on the stove.
Anyway you come
fried, cued, burnt
to within one inch
of your life I love. Babe,
I revere your every
nickname—bacon, chitlin,
crackling, sin.
Some call you murder,
shame’s step-sister—
then dress you up
& declare you white
& healthy, but you always
come back, sauced, to me.
Adam himself gave up
a rib to see yours
piled pink beside him.
Your heaven is the only one
worth wanting—
you keep me all night
cursing your four-
letter name, the next
begging for you again.

Circe
    CAROL ANN DUFFY
    I’m fond, nereids and nymphs, unlike some, of the pig,
Of the tusker, the snout, the boar and the swine.
One way or another, all pigs have been mine—
Under my thumb, the bristling, salty skin of their backs,
In my nostrils here, their yobby, porky colognes.
I’m familiar with hogs and runts, their percussion of oinks
At dusk, at the creaky gate of the sty,
Tasting the sweaty, spicy air, the moon
Like a lemon popped in the mouth of the sky.
But I want to begin with a recipe from abroad
    which uses the cheek—and the tongue in cheek
at that. Lay two pig’s cheeks, with the tongue,
in a dish, and strew it well over with salt
and cloves. Remember the skills of the tongue—
to lick, to lap, to loosen, lubricate, to lie
in the soft pouch of the face—and how each pig’s face
was uniquely itself, as many handsome as plain,
the cowardly face, the brave, the comical, noble,
sly or wise, the cruel, the kind, but all of them,
nymphs, with those piggy eyes. Season with mace.

Song to Bacon
    ROY BLOUNT JR.
    Consumer groups have gone and taken
Some of the savor out of bacon.
Protein-per-penny in bacon, they say,
Equals needles-per-square-inch of hay.
Well, I know, after cooking all
That’s left to eat is mighty small
           (You also get a lot of lossage
           In life, romance, and country sausage),
And I will vote for making it cheaper,
Wider, longer, leaner, deeper,
But let’s not throw the baby, please,
Out with the (visual rhyme here) grease.
There’s nothing crumbles like bacon still,
And I don’t think there ever will
Be anything, whate’er you use
For meat, that chews like bacon chews.
And also: I wish these groups would tell
Me whether they counted in the smell.
The smell of it cooking’s worth $2.10 a pound.
And how bout the
sound
?

1-800-Hot-Ribs
    CATHERINE BOWMAN
    My brother sent me ribs for my birthday.
He sent me two six-pound, heavily scented,
slow-smoked slabs, Federal Express,
in a customized cardboard box, no bigger
than a baby coffin or a bulrush ark.
    Swaddled tight in sheaves of foam and dry ice,
those ribs rested in the hold of some jetliner
and were carried high, over the Yellowhammer State
and the Magnolia State and the Brown Thrasher State,
over Kentucky coffeetrees and Sitka spruce
    and live oak and wild oak and lowland plains
and deep-water harbors, over catfish farms
and single-crib barns and Holiness sects
and strip malls and mill towns and lumber
towns and coal camps and chemical plants,
    to my table on this island on a cold night
with no moon where I eat those ribs and am made
full from what must have been a young animal,
small-boned and tender, having just
the right ratio of meat to fat.
    Tonight outside, men and women enrobed
in blankets fare forth from shipping crates.
A bloodhound lunges against its choke
to sniff the corpse of a big rat and heaps
of drippings and grounds that steam
    outside the diner as an ashen woman deep
in a doorway presses a finger to her lips.
A matted teddy bear impaled on a spike
looms over a vacant lot where a line of men
wreathe in fellowship around a blazing garbage can.
    Tonight in a dream they