Sing scrapple: buckwheat-
& cornmeal mush-stuffed
relative of head cheese,
the hog’s gray matter.
Plus every part
that couldn’t be cured
into ham or crammed
into sausage casings —
some good foot meat, perhaps,
a corkscrew piece of tail —
up to & including
the oleaginous grunt.
Always the butt of jokes
for the ignorant mass
of weiner-eaters who prefer
their pig scraps pink
& prefitted for the throat.
This is a square meal
the color of earth.
It’s what’s for supper
when you haven’t eaten
since breakfast, & want
something you can
slap in the hot
fat of a griddle & fry
until it grows a thick
brown skin. Then
serve with Grade-A
maple syrup, go hog-
wild, wallow in the gray
& gritty mush.
Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
cruel gruel fried
It’s like Upton Sinclair meets Walt Whitman.
I’m starting to cry. There’s no scrapple to be had for hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles.
quiet regular – Go on…
Brett – Upton Sinclair? Dude, that was praise! Scrapple is not only health food, it shows respect to the spirit of the pig by using every part.
Rose – Really? Bummer. Maybe you could order it online.
Hmmm, remind me to bring my brothers home made scrapple next time. I think my next piggy will be sometime in December.
You are making me hungry. The grocery store that i go to always has a few whole ho’s heads for sale…right next to the whole cow’s tongue, tripe , chicken feet nad various livers and brains. I tried to read it all in one breath. Made me even hungrier.
I meant to to say hog instead of ho
That’s some grocery store!
Yum!
Do you really say head cheese? That’s what it’s called here.
Yeah, though I don’t know how common it is anymore, outside of Fred’s grocery store. Even scrapple, as you may have gathered, is restricted to the northeast – basically Pennsylvania and the neighboring portions of adjacent states.
The “oleaginous grunt” — Eew! I was in a house where chitlins were boiled — that is, until I went back outside.
“mush-stuffed”: now that’s a great word!
Wiener-eaters as poop — hot-dog eating poop!
“Square” is herein invested with practically crawling, steaming meaning. I like the earth thing. Carpentry with a dirt floor.
“something you can slap in the hot fat”– o do I like to slap those somethings.
Damn! I want to get in that wallow.
Sue Coe’s sujbect, but with gustatory affection.
Thanks for the close reading, Bill.
Was my pleasure — thanks for indulging me my comments. I doubt I got very close. I’ve been away. Every thing seems a bit upside down right now. In the exercise of appreciating your art something is made to which I can orient myself. Things get too heavy and a countering equivalence is needed in words. Via Negativa be darned — I think you are making worlds. Maybe it’s that double negative effect that another reader mentioned. Maybe it doesn’t take a double, but just one. One slicing negative. Is there such a knife?
well i must say,, i have never indulged,, and since i am not much for a hot dog either,, after this i do believe i will abstain…
the writing was excellent,, the word choices precise… loved it…..
Anything with maple syrup is delicious and so is your poem!
Thanks, paisley and Linda. Glad you found it to your taste. :)
I read this one back when.
It still makes me laugh and not know quite what to say, being a westerner and all. An “ignorant…weiner-eater…who prefer[s]…my…pig scraps pink/ & prefitted for the throat.”
:-)
I ate it once, in Virginia, in the 80s, just to tell. The color turned me, so to speak.