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Prairie Schooner 77.4 (2003) 92-93



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from The Packing House Cantata
Cudahy Packing Co.
South Omaha, 1958

William Trowbridge


3. Sticker

Inside that fusty hall of oak and chains
and pulsing din, fit for rack and thumbscrew,
quickness counted, concentration too:
Hung by a hind leg, hogs scream and flail
and bite. That knife can cut both ways. The bite
heals slow. He kept inside his to and fro:
Perforate and pull, step back, then up again,
his face that Indian's on the nickel, squared
and still, unastonished by the sudden spill.

4. Knocker

South High's only four-sport letterman, they said,
with a swing that made the scouts crap silver dollars,
with a taste for gin-laced Thunderbird. The girls
thought Portier, Bellefonte then. He wound up in the box
above the knocking pens, seasoned and alone,
dropping steers with an eight-pound sledge
between the eyes, routine as batting practice
if they still used heads instead of balls. He was a lifer
like the rest, who never saw him after work. [End Page 92]

5. Luggers

They were built for battering, good Packer linemen
if you didn't have to run and only blocked
the guy in front of you. Instead, they shouldered beef,
a quarter at a time, into trucks and boxcars,
wearing butchers' coats and cotton caps that covered
neck and ears. What words they had were blunt
from overuse, but they knew what entertained here:
a poon-tang joke, a bloody nose, a goosing
with a five-pound hook. You almost had to laugh.

6. D. P.

"Displaced person" - low-life refugee - D. P. Carl
had rusty rings around his crotch and armpits, rancid hair,
brown picket teeth. Exchanging smirks, they brought him by
to tell me how to screw a horse. "I like kitchen ladder,"
he advised, thrusting at air as I tried to look the way I did
the time Coach Green showed me how to punt. "Still don't reach,"
he finally allowed, pushing his empty bin back to his favorite spot
outside the foreman's view. Damned D. P., they called him,
though he was native born and most of them were called that too.

7. Stoolie

He worked in a bubble nearly thick enough to see,
grinding sausage next to where the loins were weighed,
chubby in his Big Smiths and yellow union cap,
offering his two cents now and then, maybe just to tell
if he still was there, since he'd been declared
an empty space, a spot you look through as you pass
to use the john. They said he kept a pocket gun,
parked his car right by the gate, till a few months
proved him safe as a ghost no one believes in.




William Trowbridge's books are Flickers, O Paradise, Enter Dark Stranger, all from the University of Arkansas Press, and two chapbooks, The Four Seasons (Red Dragonfly P) and The Book of Kong (Iowa State UP). His work has appeared in the Gettsyburg Review, Poetry, Crazyhorse, the Georgia Review, and many others. He is an associate editor at the Laurel Review.

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