I lived once beside a slaughterhouse
Mornings were a thing of gears.
They were regulation-compliant machinery.
The trucks, mounted with cylinders, broke their necks
on the switchbacks of local roads. They drained.
These are the problems of living by a slaughterhouse:
excess life. I remember the thermaling birds,
flies on the screen doors and fruit bowl,
and when the wind hitched and tumbled
like a freighted truck on a bad turn,
a living smell came into my room.
The conversation of a pig with a knife
you see, lasts a long time.
-James Appleby
James Appleby (b. 1993) is editor of Interpret, Scotland's magazine of international writing. His original poetry is published in The London Magazine, his translations in Asymptote, and his upcoming debut pamphlet, Spurious Language, was commended in the 2024 International Book & Pamphlet Competition. He was born in Manchester and lives in Edinburgh.
James Appleby’s deft and concentrated poem, “I lived once beside a slaughterhouse,” is antithetical to Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them,” in which the urban scene is one of brisk interactions and physical, mental, and artistic nourishment. Consider Appleby’s first line: “Mornings were a thing of gears.” What a terse and true embodiment of industrial strain—the heritage of Dickens’ Gradgrind. A new day brings no bustlings of possibility, only new ratchetings decreed by a glum bureaucracy, “regulation-compliant.” No flaneurs swan along the streets—instead, a violence of trucks “broke their necks on the switchbacks of local roads,” the climb a kind of flagellation, a perpetual penance.
In its fifth line, the poem confides: “These are the problems of living by a slaughterhouse: / excess life.” Through a perverse synergy, life embraces its omnipresent opposite. Instead of construction workers happily chowing down lunch, we have “thermaling birds”—black, jagged-winged scavengers; we have “flies on the screen doors and fruit bowl.” Any spontaneity here involves dark lives hastening to feed on death and/or lay their eggs in it. The wind, far from a romantic bearer of infinite tidings, is but another vehicle in death’s fleet: “like a freighted truck on a bad turn,” an image that surprises us with ironic humor. The poem’s reversals are not yet finished: “a living smell came into my room. . . “ The conversation that Frank O’Hara has with the cityscape, that as poetry joins what Wallace Stevens calls “the long conversation between poets,” finds its scarifying opposite: “The conversation of a pig with a knife / you see, lasts a long time.” The routine slaughter that for Charles Simic, in his poem “Butcher Shop,” becomes, on the butcher’s apron, “the great continents of blood”--a saturation mysterious, even grand—is here an overweening and insidious stink. How telling that Appleby’s poem takes the word “conversation”—for O’Hara, a thing that happens between two people when one of them writes a poem and the other reads it—and makes of it a deadly encounter of blade and artery that reverberates in air, a blow that no plague posey can deflect—one that the poem delivers with mock gentleness— “you see.” Alas, we do see, with our entire mortal bodies. If everyone lived “beside a slaughterhouse,” all this might change—but this is not the poem’s business. James Appleby’s fluent, exact “Once I Lived Beside a Slaughterhouse” makes us witnesses. Then it steps away, leaving us among its eloquent fumes. -Angela Ball
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