Pig (Dominguez)
I pulled into the Galdini Sausage plant at noon.
The workers walked out of production
and swatted away the flies desperate for pork.
Pork gripped the men and was everywhere,
in the form of blood, in the form of fat,
and in pink meat stuck to the worker’s shoes.
Outside, eighty pound boxes of pork
melted under the sun, and as the sun worked,
the blood and fat grew soft, and the boxes
lined with wax became like thin paper soaked in oil.
Mack trucks came in with unprocessed pork
and took out chorizo, linguica, hot links, and sausage:
German, Sweet, Breakfast, Hot, and Mild.
One man stood straight up into the sky,
closed his eyes, and with his thumb and forefinger,
worked out bits of meat from his eyelashes
glistening like black grease under the sun.
The air conditioner in Mr. Galdini’s’s office
made the papers from his desk float onto the floor.
He gave me a hard hat, a smock, an apron, and a hair net.
“You’re in there,” he said and lifted the blinds
of a window that partitioned his office and production.
He stood, gut pushed out, and his whole body
swayed with ease as we watched the workers walk out,
hump-backed under the unyielding memory of pig.