Organ-Grinding – Meg Tuite

June 17, 2021

Backlogged tacos fester inside a body ill-equipped to digest them. Rotting burgers demand too much from some orifice or soft shell of skin to find a way to the quickest exit. Instead, they stack and seep within you for decades. Heart, spleen, intestines, liver, stomach, each hold back gossip of the secret sauces they contain. Now, mouths rattle over spot-stained kitchen utensils. No one ever calls in to write up this meat hacking hole teeming with pestilence. 

It’s not as though interventions haven’t attempted an assault. Vitamins, non-dimensional and patinaed, are ingested. Chinese needles ravage confessions from pores. Bones as easy to snap as Fritos chiropract into cheap Styrofoam platters layering inhospitable meats in blurs of yellows, whites and catatonic reds. The body lifts a bit from the color palate of the sky to calm you. Double rainbows ransack trigger-blood balms of oils. Rabid scars of melting cheese and peppers keep piñata death scenes from bruising this terrible hunger igniting you. 

Buckling bones avert their eyes when you clamor out of work. “Family emergency,” all of them say. Kidneys rumble as you move closer to the source. The fingering loop of nostrils pulse, not unaware that they inhale this dance so well. Really, it’s a Broadway show when the city ruptures. Millions of restricted veins swell in unison. They follow the groping scent of double-fried, extra-crispy, and unified.

A hollow voice from a speaker generates what you need. “Can I take your order?”
The black box speculates with a fluid understanding of the maternal.
You speak. “Everyone fights to get inside and wrench out the wretched. Is there a day when a face discovers a face as untethered as a cold bare room?”
The voice responds, “That was two double-burgers with bacon, three large French fries, and a Chocolate milk-shake, right?”