Just last week, as I was watching a children’s cooking competition
over the screen of my laptop, I saw a boy, age nine,
take a mid-size chef’s knife in his right hand and carefully
bowel a steak, it looked like top loin, boneless, but I didn’t hear,
and I instantly thought of something I hadn’t wanted
to go over: the body of a doe, just struck and bleeding
out from the jowl, its misshapen teeth formed into something
sinister and sentimental in the flash of the arriving
police vehicles. I know they are not the same
animal. I know I will think of both of them again.
I know that the boy and I do not share a body
or fame or taste in seasoning. Lately I have only
used smoked salt from the Cape Cod Bay,
even if the dish does not need the perverse metal
slick of it, and there he was saying he had just discovered
these large, clean flakes from Portland, putting them
both inside and outside the wound of this short loin,
and then stuffing it with lemon of all things.
I was asked if I could write a eulogy for my love if he died
first. This was supposed to be a practical question.
I knew someone who was facing the same thing, she
had to write in memorium of her beloved sous chef
and sexual partner. As I sat in the line of cars
that night, the sky a tinny, panicked black, I watched
the doe’s tail continue to whip back and forth
quickly as though it was warning others of a need
to escape, and then in this wagging way
like it was in the middle of softening sumac with
its tongue. This was strange, as the deer no longer
had a middle. Every time I try and answer the question
I come back to one of two things: there is no way
in any rung of Hell I could use what I have to capture
the ancient, open water of him I love more fiercely
than consumption and satiety itself, and, I am
doing it all the time, and it terrifies me.
Before the hour ran out the boy managed
to make a stock: small, probably weak, with the shank
from the opposite side of the animal, and he laid
the roasted loin into it and carefully dusted
the whole thing with chives. I cannot figure out
if I make others the loin or the lights of the police car
on the deer that had just been struck by a silver Chrysler,
2008, the driver already calling a buddy to come help him
haul off the thing to clean. The boy made it all the way
to the final round of the competition, but lost
with an underbaked honey and thyme cake. Even though
I left the scene feeling empty and small I keep cooking
and watching others cook as though I can canonize them.
Still, here is the deer. Here is the rib, loin and round
of the cow. And here, somewhere, is my fear that soon
he will be lured by the bait of death before I have
a chance to dispute it. I said no when she asked.
Now, I praise the white tail and even the driver
who took it, the boy cleaning his knife carefully before
exiting the stage, and him taking the last bite
of our last meal of the day and pausing to notice
the hint of something he hadn’t gotten until just then:
the small bite of gray smoke at the back of the tongue.
Gabrielle Campagnano holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in America Magazine, Tule Review, and Salamander Magazine, among others. She is at work on her first full-length collection of poems.