Free The Hungry Ear by Kevin Young Page B

if there’s a choice
in the matter. To fast is not to starve.
The thirteen ravenous, sea-queasy pigs
Hernando de Soto loosed near Tampa
in 1542 ate whatever
    they liked. How glad they must have been to hoove
some soil after skidding in the slick hold
week after dark week: a pig without sun
on its sullied back grows skittish and glum.
Pigs and pioneers would build America.
Cincinnati was called Porkopolis
in the 1830s; the hogs arrived,
as the hunger for them had, by river,
from which a short forced march led to slaughter.
A new country travels on its belly,
    and manufacture starts in the barnyard:
hide for leather and stomach for pepsin.
In France, a farm family calls its pig
“Monsieur.” According to a CIA
tally early in 1978,
the Chinese kept 280 million
of the world’s 400 million pigs;
perhaps all of them were called “The Chairman.”
Emmaeus, swineherd to Odysseus,
guarded 600 sows and their litters
    (the males slept outside), and no doubt each sow
and piglet had its own name in that rich
matriarchal mire. And I like to think
that in that mild hospice future pork roasts
fattened toward oblivion with all
the love and dignity that husbandry
has given up to be an industry,
and that the meat of Emmaeus’s coddled
porkers tasted a little sweeter for
the graces of affection and a name.

Remembering Kitchens
    THYLIAS MOSS
    In the kitchen we compensate for missiles
in the world by fluting edges of crust
to bake rugged, primping rosettes and peaks
on cakes that are round tables with white
butter cloths swirled on, portable
Communion altars.
    On the Sundays, ham toasted itself
with lipid melts, the honey veneer
waxed pork conceit to unnameable luster
and humps of rump poked
through the center of pineapple slices
so as to form tonsured clerical heads,
the Sundays being exceptional.
    The waiting for the bread
helped us learn, when it arrived steaming
like kicked-up chariot dust then died down
quickly the staid attitude of its brown dress,
the lovely practical.
In the center of the table
we let it loaf. When that was through
we sliced it into a file to rival the keeping
of the Judgment notes. So we kept our own,
a second set, and judged the judges, toasting
with cranberry water in Libbey glasses
that came from deep in the Duz. All this
in moon’s skim light.
    Somehow the heat of the stove,
flames shooting up tall and blue, good looking
in the uniform, had me pulling down the door,
the seat of the Tappan’s pants, having the heat push
against me, melting off my pancake makeup, nearly
a chrysalis moment, my face registering then
at least four hundred degrees, and rising
in knowledge, the heat rising too, touching
off the sensors for the absolute mantra
of the ringing, the heat sizzling through cornices
and shingles, until the house is a warm alternative
to heavenly and hellish extremes,
and I remove Mama’s sweet potato pie, one made
—as are her best—in her sleep when she can’t
interfere, when she’s dreaming at the countertop
that turns silk beside her elegant leaning, I slice it
and put the whipped cream on quick, while the pie
is hot so the peaks of cream will froth; these
are the Sundays my family suckles grace.

Song to Barbecue Sauce
    ROY BLOUNT JR.
    Hot and sweet and red and greasy,
I could eat a gallon easy:
Barbecue sauce!
Lay it on, hoss.
    Nothing is dross
Under barbecue sauce.
    Brush it on chicken, slosh it on pork,
Eat it with fingers, not with a fork.
I could eat barbecued turtle or squash—
I could eat tar paper cooked and awash
In barbecue sauce.
    I’d eat Spanish moss
With barbecue sauce.
    Hear this from Evelyn Billiken Husky,
Formerly Evelyn B. of Sandusky:
“Ever since locating down in the South,
I have had barbecue sauce on my mouth.”
    Nothing can gloss
Over barbecue sauce.

United States of Barbecue
    JAKE ADAM YORK
    Mud Creek, Dreamland, Twixt-n-Tween,
the cue-joints rise through smoke
and glow like roadhouses on Heaven’s way.
Or so the