Road Food

Saint Paul, 7 July 2006

Fry cooks as near-sighted as a slaughterhouse steer

Vestibule tabloids warn of spoiled meat north of the border

We wait for hungry ruminant animals to amble around races

Watch them double back muzzle to anus to the same point

Walls festooned with antique meat cleavers and carcass hooks

Morbid mothers order ground beef in fractions of pounds

Fathers ferry trays with cartoon-cross sections of limbs

Cherubic girls wipe their mouths with dewclaw-embossed napkins

Short boys with man tits spin ketchup bottles around a lazy-Susan

Genderless urchins color cuts of loin on disposable placemats

Filled up we exit emergency chutes made to simulate sausage casings

Mounted on swinging booms to ooze us back into our idling vehicles