The Hipster Hillbilly

            My first day as a meat-cutter apprentice, my trainer David handed me a plastic green boxcutter.     “One day this is all you will need to know.” He said, forlornly flicking out the safety-sized blade.     I was fortunate enough to come up around the last of the old-school.  They fed me tall-tales of the good ol’ days—sawdust on the floors, cigarettes on edge of the block, a case of beer in the hollow of a lamb’s chest cavity, breaking down hanging beef with a boning blade, labor unions paying double-time-and-a-half on Sundays, and blowjobs from smoking hot meat-wrappers in the cooler.  To me they were Gods, though fallen angels might have more aptly been appropriate.  They drank heavily, chain-smoked cigarettes, sported tattoos and scars from a life of hard-living and hard knocks.        They could show up late and hungover, hit on customers, cuss at the managers, and somehow they could...

          Sweating in the cutting room beneath fans blowing a slow and steady stream of refreshingly cold, bitter air.  Trembling hands gripping the black fibrox handles of carbon steel scimitars and shoulders aching from the incessant slicing motion of the glistening steel blades.  Bandsaws serenading, matching the hum of the fans, singing in unison with rumble and roar like the war cry of a mechanized battalion.  We were a well-oiled and finely tuned machine, churning out cuts of meat like a warehouse assembly line.  The broken and busted racks were filled on each remaining slat with packages of beef and pork and pushed into the holding cooler waiting for all Hell to break loose the following day.     We had prepared for this day for weeks on end.  I couldn’t give two shits about any other market in the company, but we would be prepared.  We had buggies full of bagged crab legs and trayed-up fish in the freezer. ...

No one has ever liked my poetry.  I’ve published a few.  But everyone hates it.  Yet, I still continue to write.  My friend Eva refers to it as a “cheap” representation of what I am capable of, and “lazy.”  I enjoy writing poetry.  Mostly I write it when I’m feeling down.  So a lot of the stuff is just full of melancholy.  It’s just how I process things and that’s what poetry is for.  Just a means by which I get my feelings out so I don’t have to talk about them. Memories of Ghosts:   I gave you all of me, what I had left; the other part I discovered, still alive breathing, waiting to be found, only half-dead, and you breathed life into it and revived it, like you  revived the whole of me.   A phoenix born of ashes I was born again from cigarette ash and whiskey, a liver hardened and a heart softened like sand in the surf wet with anticipation of the next touch, the next kiss, the next text, the next whisper in my ear, the soun...

  Gangs claiming the Men’s Room stalls as their turf.  I hoped they would keep the restrooms better stocked and cleaner than our company, but they were a disappointing housekeeper.   I’m not an intimidating individual.  At 6’1” and then 224 pounds, I rocked thick-rimmed glasses and a white polo shirt.  I was just this average, unassuming dude—a childless freak with a dad-bod.  But somehow I was always the one called on as security to deal with shoplifters.   I’m not a fighter.  I had one good fight where I went up against four people…and lost sorely.  I still sport a scar above my eye and on my elbow.  I’m a lover of the finer things in life: wine, women, and song.  But not in that particular order.     My store manager was informed one morning by a snitch customer about another customer in the restroom stealing merchandise and, for whatever reason, called me to assist.  We waited until the guy exited the restroom bef...

      Ham bone soup became an after Christmas tradition about a decade ago.  My roommate at the time had a leftover Honey Baked ham that we placed in the crockpot with a package of 15 beans and an extreme amount of sugar and glaze.  God-fucking-damnit!—AMAZING!  I copied the recipe and made it after the holiday every year since.     What started out simple became more complex over the years, adding ingredients as life grew as complicated as the flavor of the soup.  Each year, no matter how simple or how complex, it is always a crowd pleaser.  But it never tastes the same.  With each passing year, the flavor changes as life changes.  In life, as with cooking, you add and subtract.  You gain people and lose people; you add ingredients and you remove some.  One year there was just ham and beans and sugar.  The next year suddenly onions came out of nowhere; another, hot sauce and stock instead of water, brown sugar i...

      I was probably about three years old, bundled up for the Appalachian winter in a poofy red jacket without a hat, holding a severed deer’s head with attached hide, and wearing a shit-eating grin from ear to ear as I cheesed for the photo.  While my grandfather never worked a day in the meat-cutting industry, he was a skilled butcher.  People brought him deer to skin, quarter, and cut.  I was introduced to the art of meat-cutting at a young age.  I “helped” Paw-Paw skin out a button buck on that chilly December afternoon with snow peppering the ground and a fog of breath exhaling from my lungs.  Looking back, it was all the makings of a serial killer documentary.  I can see it now.  “He always had a taste for death.”  But it was just a normal and accepted thing in my family, save for my father who didn’t inherit the hunting gene.  Sometimes things skip a generation. “Sweetheart Steak” for Valentine’s Day After skinning and ...