meat
One afternoon in March the god-fearing wife of Farmer Crouch was making soap on her porch when she heard slap! slap! slap! so on the ground she looked down not 40 steps from her house—and then and there the sky was red, red meat falling from the clouds, three whole minutes of red meat falling. it was not steak tartare, which Farmer Crouch would have ingested unquestioned, but something grisly, which Farmer Crouch and his wife ate anyway because it was free and heaven-sent, pot roast or meatballs or meatloaf. some reported it tasted like a deer or a horse or a bear or a baby and to this day no one knows what kind of meat was falling from the sky in Kentucky in 1876 for three minutes.
cesspool
1973, the day the cesspool overflows and creates a sinkhole beneath the Seckel pear tree outside your window. you are amazed at the solid items that have amassed, but pay them no mind. this is just your shit—every frozen mini peanut butter cup, every bite of tongue, every Spaghetti-O. Every single thing forced into you and out of you. Stand. Stay. After a time a bush will grow out of the cesspool’s cement mouth, a bush that blooms purple. Only then can you go away and come back and walk past that bush when July is leaving, and ask if you may have two petals. When permission is granted, place them on your bruised eyelids & watch what happens behind them. This is your future: pickled beets, hugs, To Die For.
cabbage
that time we wondered whether we’d whimper if someone tied our hands behind our back, hacked us into pieces with a chainsaw and flushed us down the toilet. no one can answer that truthfully unless they’re dead, and even then the killer would have had to exercise incredible control, cutting through bone and tissue with an 8.3-pound portable and rotating thing. you would not be thinking that. you’d be thinking how only certain items can be safely flushed down the toilet, not pieces of us, but certain expired foods like the pea soup we’d grow out of before it was done. remember we bought the ingredients together at the deli up the street? no matter what day, the proprietress always asked if you wanted savoy cabbage. “nobody cooks anymore,” she’d say, but you did, and not only that you wanted the prettiest cabbage in the land. i never told you that her store was broken into and vandalized multiple times during the pandemic, and the last time it happened they left the neighborhood forever
la pietà
Vatican City, 1972: A 33-year-old geologist shouts I have risen from the dead enters St. Peter’s Basilica and with his hammer hacks at La Pietà, the only work the sculptor ever signed, 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 times, Mary’s forearm, nose and eyelid flying through the greatest of all churches in Christendom. Another visitor grabs the geologist by the beard We both fell into the crowd of screaming Italians as Mary’s arm falls to the floor, her fingers breaking her fingers broken as workers and tourists snatch them up. Bits of her neck head and veil confetti in the chapel small sweets thrown during carnivals everyone gets some, and the geologist is not charged with a crime. Some of the fragments were returned, but many were not. Her finger, her nose. The sculpture is 473 years old. From the 27 books in the New Testament, just two contain words spoken by Mary.
Pune Dracker is a writer, editor and activist in New York City. She holds an MA in Design Research, Writing & Criticism from School of Visual Arts, and her lyric essays have appeared in Seneca Review, Hyperallergic, Hinterland, and Oculus Magazine. She is currently at The Graduate Center, researching and writing about 1970s teen idols through a lens of fashion and gender.