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raven’s home + bee & puppycat are really holding me together today

A poem by Catherine Bowman

1-800-HOT-RIBS

My brother sent me ribs for my birthday. He sent me two six-pound, heavily scented, slow-smoked slabs, Federal Express, in a customized cardboard box, no bigger than a baby coffin or a bulrush ark. Swaddled tight in sheaves of foam and dry ice, those ribs rested in the hold of some jetliner and were carried high, over the Yellowhammer State and the Magnolia State and the Brown Thrasher State, over Kentucky coffee trees and Sitka spruce and live oak and wild oak and lowland plains and deep-water harbors, over catfish farms and single-crib barns and Holiness sects and strip malls and mill towns and lumber towns and coal camps and chemical plants, to my table on this island on a cold night with no moon where I eat those ribs and am made full from what must have been a young animal, small-boned and tender, having just the right ratio of meat to fat. Tonight outside, men and woman enrobed in blankets fare forth from shipping crates. A bloodhound lunges against its choke to sniff the corpse of a big rat and heaps of drippings and ground that steam outside the dinner as an ashen woman deep in a doorway presses a finger to her lips. A matter teddy bear impaled on a spike looms over a vacant lot where a line of men wreathe in fellowship around a blazing garbage can. Tonight in a dream they gather all night to labor over the unadorned beds they have dug into the ground and filled with the hardwood coals that glow like remote stars. Their faces molten and ignited in the damp, they know to turn the meat infrequently, they know to keep the flame slow and the fire cool. From a vat of spirits subacid and brackish, they know to baste only occasionally. So that by sunrise vapor will continue to collect, as usual, forming, as it should, three types of clouds, that the rainfall from the clouds, it is certain, will not exceed the capacity of the river, that the river will still flow, as always, sweet brother, on course.