Poems by Luke Welch
By Luke Welch
Plants feel pain,
you tell me
as you bite into
the cow’s cooked flesh
and feel no remorse.
I sit across from you
and eat my black bean burger.
I can hear the beans screaming
from between the slices of bread.
I squeeze them tight
to keep my food from wiggling free.
The lettuce, onions, and tomato
are conspiring
their escape and wondering
how they got here
to the bottom of this
particular food-chain.
You have convinced me
that killing a plant
is the same as killing
an animal, and therefore
the same
as killing a person, I think,
as I regard you across the table
and reach for a bottle
of ketchup.
“Giving Thanks”
By Luke Welch
Thank you, creature
that once lived
and now lies, still
and cooked, upon the table.
Thank you for giving
everything
to we who take
so much,
so hungrily,
without grace.
You lived and breathed
in a cramped pen,
were fattened up,
and shipped to slaughter,
skinned and drained,
hacked and sliced,
and cellophaned
for supermarket shelves
where we picked you out
from among your herd,
your brothers and sisters,
like choosing a dead puppy
for adoption.
We can't see your eyes
or hear your bleet or snort
or moo or cluck.
You're just a hunk of meat
we cook well so we don't upset
our sensitive stomachs,
spice you with plants,
like rosemary, basil,
cloves, and thyme,
so you taste more
appetizing.
We imagine ourselves lions,
the top of the food chain,
and cut and jab chunks of you
into our gaping mouths,
trying not to choke,
as we gossip around the table,
bleeting and snorting and mooing and clucking,
and trying not to think
too hard
about anything.
“Rendering”
By Luke Welch
I trace her ribs with my fingertips,
lie my palm on her abdomen.
I stamp my lips on her eyelids
her cheeks, her mouth.
in her home country she was una recepcionista
por un abogado. A receptionist in a lawyer’s office.
Here she works a production line,
rendering pigs into parts.
I could joke that she brings home the bacon,
but mostly she brings home welts
on her hands and arms
where she’s accidently poked herself
because the line was moving too fast
and one hand jabbed or sliced
before her other hand had moved aside,
as if her arms are separate beings,
two workers in competition.
Her chain gloves keep the knife
from penetrating.
If she complains about the speed of the conveyor,
she’ll be written up and told,
“There are others lined up to replace you.”
All day the dead pigs file past
and she grabs onto each one,
rough, quick, no time for apology,
and slices them into parts.
She falls apart on the bed when she gets home.
I put kisses on her welts. On her hands.
I put kisses on her shoulders,
her hips, her breasts.
She lies beneath me and as I kiss each part,
I feel nerve endings remember the way,
veins share blood with each other again,
tendons grip one-another like comrades,
bones rejoin and joints bend in unison,
and she moves beneath me,
surging, undulant,
and is whole again,
alive, vibrant,
and ready to love,
ready to fight,
to fix,
this broken,
goddamned world.
- Luke Welch is hiding out in a small town in northern Illinois, working as a
sign language interpreter. He has recently rekindled his relationship with
poetry after having abandoned it at a bus stop in Peoria ten years ago with
some harsh words and spare change. He is sorry. “Rendering” previously appeared
in Blue Collar Review (2009).