Mixing Chopped Meat

Plunge your hands in the bowl feeling assorted lumps, take sticky clumps in your hands, turn them over and over, pat, palm, squeeze strands between your fingers. The latter is, strictly speaking, unnecessary but compelling. Gunk sticks in your ring which with foresight you could have removed. Elemental, this twisting muscle, churning guts, palpating fat ‘til it begins to warm and spread and lose definition. What was discrete is now muddied, heavy.

Take your hands out of the bowl Dana, now! Some parts of the past are indigestible: my childhood through the wrong end of a telescope. No need to churn it up now.

Wiener frying in a pan curls, writhes like a snake trapped in too-tight skin. Boiling sausage bloats, casing bursts, emits a grease slick and a vomitous constellation of accreted bits that resist breaking down.

Matter is neither created nor destroyed. But what about thoughts and feelings? Can the heavy part that was never material in the first place reappear in a person who, for a glorious instant, is happy? Can it dance a jig or land on a lily pad? Swim? Love? Be loved? Can it stretch into a bridge sturdy enough for immigrants to cross?

What about immaterial stuff that in the long run seems inconsequential? Can some of it be sequestered, destroyed or lost to time without the entire fabric losing integrity? Must everything need to be able to be reconstituted? Must it all still be there?

Remember that woman in the window packing translucent pig gut tighter than a cigar, flicking her wrist to twist the bulging hose into a link, then cutting it off as surely as a gorgon’s snip?

My mind is clotted with things overlapping, choking one another, battling to stay relevant. Popeye’s multiple fists flying in a cloud of dust-up. Cartoon characters bumping into each other, rubber necks and torsos entwining the other’s suddenly elongated body like bittersweet. Archaic words insisting on slapping themselves into action.

O.K., I whimper. I’ll make a compendium of what’s stuffing me like organ meat, dense and too red. I’ll let each thing be a run-on, but I might circle back. I’ll start with B’s: Beelzebub! boisterous bubbling burbling bowels, bent over bowl, blistering, burning buns, bulbous piles, bottom’s up, belligerent bilious belly, bastion of brew spew, beneath, beside, behind . . .

Oh enough already! Off with my head!