Anthony Bourdain Died Just After My Father and Now There is Nobody Left Who Can Teach Me Steak, by Rax King

The cook time is evolving. The time
is constantly evolving. Do not fucking
touch it. Skin
like the buckling of old grass. No food
isn’t a poem. Pepper

and the chili shell. Broken beans. Evolution
is the cook time. The cook
time is the evolution. Meat thinks

how flesh thinks, how body
thinks, how leather remembers the stink
of the barnyard, how integrity needs
an initial lie, how I can force my hands to work
when they’re bloody, how prisoners
and the dead recall the way they liked their eggs. Please,
grab the world and never ungrab

it. Please, slice
into steak too fast and turn the whole world
red. Do not

fucking touch it, and I never did. Touch me

and I’ll touch back. One day, a man I loved
was muck and clay. The brain is a devastating
accident. Nobody ever had a mind
too fine to feed buzzards
and worms. Meat

can be so live it doesn’t get cooked. Tonight
I dine on kidskin and calflings. No I haven’t fucking
touched it.

Rax King is a dog-loving, hedgehog-mothering, beer-swilling, gay and disabled sumbitch who occasionally writes poetry. She is the author of the collection 'The People's Elbow: Thirty Recitatives on Rape and Wrestling' (Ursus Americanus, 2018) and her work has also recently appeared in Yes Poetry, Dream Pop, and Five:2:One.