The Inelegance of Meat
Mikki Aronoff
“I’m too old for cow,” she whines, this child of eleven-almost-twelve, every time she smells meat, whether fire-kissed pugilist red or poached white as anemia, she blurts excuses, too terrified to speak truth to her mother, instead deflects, whistles “I’m stuffed” through that squeezed small aperture under her nose, while her mother loads flesh onto forks, poises for a golden opening, but the girl just swivels her head, having observed evasion from an early age, osmotic understudy of her only present parent, that prim paragon of business and hearth, magnet of promise and bruise, exalted master of disguise (but for that handprint that flamed last year on the pale of her cheek–“Merely egg,” the mother fibbed to her stylish friends, in a brash exchange of metaphor for fact, while her once-secret paramour cowered under a cumulus of suspicion) and what can the mother do but choose to mistake her child’s refusals for premature aesthetic decisions, ill-formed, independent of reason, and devoid of sense, chalk them up to a misperceived inelegance of meat, and so she commits to repurpose her itch to keep busy, becomes tiger, stripes and crouches, stalks and shadows her child’s every vegetal bite, while nights her daughter of eleven-soon-twelve sits alone in her bedroom, rehearsing: “They feel pain, Mother,” she growls to the walls, “We feel pain” she yowls at the door.
Mikki Aronoff
“I’m too old for cow,” she whines, this child of eleven-almost-twelve, every time she smells meat, whether fire-kissed pugilist red or poached white as anemia, she blurts excuses, too terrified to speak truth to her mother, instead deflects, whistles “I’m stuffed” through that squeezed small aperture under her nose, while her mother loads flesh onto forks, poises for a golden opening, but the girl just swivels her head, having observed evasion from an early age, osmotic understudy of her only present parent, that prim paragon of business and hearth, magnet of promise and bruise, exalted master of disguise (but for that handprint that flamed last year on the pale of her cheek–“Merely egg,” the mother fibbed to her stylish friends, in a brash exchange of metaphor for fact, while her once-secret paramour cowered under a cumulus of suspicion) and what can the mother do but choose to mistake her child’s refusals for premature aesthetic decisions, ill-formed, independent of reason, and devoid of sense, chalk them up to a misperceived inelegance of meat, and so she commits to repurpose her itch to keep busy, becomes tiger, stripes and crouches, stalks and shadows her child’s every vegetal bite, while nights her daughter of eleven-soon-twelve sits alone in her bedroom, rehearsing: “They feel pain, Mother,” she growls to the walls, “We feel pain” she yowls at the door.