Meat Parts – Joanna Rafael Goldberg

January 23, 2020

        Meat boy meets meat girl in the meat forest…it’s a tale as old as dry-cured ham, so let’s skip the hor d’oeuvres and get to the marrow of it, but first, let’s feast. 

        After getting to know what was on the menus of each other, we acquired tastes for what was on each other’s menus and decided to make dining on one another a habit. As a meat team of two, we moved into a cabin made of frankfurters. In the privacy of our flesh home, we sprinkled a spam bed with prosciutto petals before seasoning our cuts under the tin lid blanket. 

        I remember the time he first removed his butcher paper underpants and I saw my meal, rich in protein. Winner-winner chicken dinner! Winsome wiener, I’ve seen meats leaner! His cured parts were smoky and salty and possibly carcinogenetic, a once-in-a-while treat. I ate and ate. My cuts of beef were Grade A, and he was a connoisseur of steak. Our love fattened. We porked and porked in the cabin built of hot dogs, then rolled in whey on the banks of the milk river, as the meat without feet spawned toward the milk ducts upstream. 

        The offal forest was awful in winter, so cold and refrigerated that even the liver trees shriveled from the freeze as the blood pond scabbed over. By day we foraged each other like wild pigs-in-a-blanket; by night, tucked ourselves inside the hotdog fort, spread out like a deli platter on a corned beef rug, warming ourselves in front of a rotisserie fireplace, rotating our bodies like those Cornish hens on the spit. We made mincemeat of each other, mistaken in thinking we would not tire of leftovers warmed over.

        Eventually we sickened of each other’s dishes. His meat tasted tainted, particularly in the space between his meatballs and salami; it made me gag. Our meatiest parts rotted once we could no longer enjoy the same banquet nightly, my tongue dotted with mold, my folds festered, and his rump stunk up the cabin until we both died from E Coli poisoning.