Haute Cuisine by Paul Otremba
After 10.5 hours in the car yesterday and the excitement of arriving at my destination, I didn’t get around to posting a poem yesterday. This one was sent by my poetry buddy.
Haute Cuisine
By Paul Otremba
The pig couldn’t know it was a pig,
not because it lacked a conspicuous
preference for truffles over the few
rotten turnips set aside for the trash,
but because when I looked, there was
a thin slit of a smile across its throat,
which explained the pig’s patience
with the cooks. One punched holes
his friend filled with garlic, each twist
of the blade loosening the meat
from a word rising in my own throat,
as I scoured dishes in the sink,
an orange slither of oil inscribed
on the surface. But the pig couldn’t
know it was a pig. No hooves
hammered against steel counters,
there was no last leap onto the stove.
The cooks, too, had only a slim
notion: one sang along with the radio,
the other wiped his hands on his shirt.
