Marrow

I take a bite of a burger after work but it, sadly, still tastes like beef. It carries with it lethargy as well as a mouthful of degaged guilt. Little girls either choke down lungfuls of cow meat or retch it from moving car windows. I think the best of these pictures, on highways and side streets alike, car doors spattered in vomit are of little girls’ gluttony, not liquor avarice and incontinence — perhaps it’s the maternalism sleepless in my breasts, or the memory of seventeen pulped clementines regorged into my hands after a teenage hangover surged from passenger seat to rear window. Regardless, the carcass bits between my teeth worm their way through my cheeks and into the bloodstream, and I’ve done what I hadn’t in ten, fifteen years. I had an entirely new set of teeth. Teeth that’d never had to tear apart carnage like this, teeth that’d been chipped, filled, braced and shaved but never ground, no. I feel nothing. I’m alone again, somehow. At what point did the peace, the temperance and ascesis, at what point did they crap out on me? My sweat reeks of meat and stock. How do the bulimics get away with it? Even if I swallow fingers now, the blood’s still defiled, what good would purging do other than allow me another view of what I cannot bear to see again? I trawl for the little girl, her proaction, her mouth and belly and blood. She’d speak her actions aloud to hear the sense in them, peel the skin of her lips and hold mouthfuls of water to distract her tongue. There’s not criticism, but patience. The taste’ll fade and the bowels will move, eventually. Patience, patience, she’ll forget, eventually. But I’ll remember. By requesting her presence in the hallway to the restroom, I forfeit her tranquility for my own, like a thin stick of gum, entirely disposable — and not even the vomit, then, will hold her in. She’s gone with the teeth. She’s supposed to be nestled between my ribs, sleeping ‘till I rock her awake, she’s supposed to be safe and warm and blissful. She’ll pass the meat with no mind of it, and I’ll be left with both her cells and that of the animal, constricting my intestines, twisting me in nautical movements, I’ll have to fight it out of myself, alone, I’ll have to wrestle it out alone. And what about her? How can I keep her? How can I reach her? I finish the burger. I finish it and stare at the paper bag it cooled in as I writhed in the halls. I stare and stare and still — nothing. Not  a thing. I’m alone again, somehow. I lick my fingers clean.

Art;

Carcass of Beef by Chaïm Soutine, 1926

Oil on canvas

https://collections.artsmia.org/art/1325/carcass-of-beef-chaim-soutine