izzy

I watch her cut right down to the bone, sliding the meat off, and it seems weird to me that depending on how you cook it, flesh will either bind tighter and cling to the bones and the tendons or just fall away like the pieces never fit together in the first place. Her cuffs are rolled and a tendril of hair trails across her eyes, narrowed in concentration. I watch her eyes dissect the leg in front of her. It’s like she can see it at every stage of life. See this leg flexing and tensing and kicking up dirt, see it jerk with the last spark of life and then hung on a hook with the skin cut off. She slides the back of her wrist across her forehead, pushing the hair back, still holding the knife and her eyes glint. Slivers of flesh shiver on my plate and Marcy kicks my leg under the table but I don’t wince this time and I don’t dob. I pour gravy over everything and it looks glorious. Just the way I like it.

*

sarah

As we hissed along the licorice strap asphalt with me at the wheel
You took it upon yourself to tell me the story of the universe
From scratch
And just when you’d got to the fishes evolving
We swept out of the tiny blinking towns and into open country
And as the night showed us both what dark really meant
I thought, shuddering, of the millions of years of boiling black waves
And the endless lidless, gaping inhabitants within
Flashing white as a nightmare through the deep down dark sea
Until the eons threw out a scaly, finned sacrifice
The world’s first thing to flop its way onto land
And lie, gasping, staring, dazzled and wondrous, at the sun

*