The Transnational - A Literary Magazine (Vol. 1)

JEANINE DEIBEL |
american carnivore
It’s not a matter of anthropology. His
pioneers shot
anyone with a bearskin or a stick. They
made good
use of fertility, raised a sufficient army,
and then cut
the king off from his property with the
flex of a red
and blue plume.
fingers staining
the third world with chronic poverty, yet
their numbers
grow, penetrate slow
and methodically, until his ever-increasing
need
disbands, competing sectors devour one
other
as mankind revels over the fall of
America, not
the beautiful – but the beast.
The American becomes a marvel, expands
himself
from sea to sea. He grows a ravenous
appetite from all
that traveling and consumes Chinese on
the western front,
loosening his belt a few notches, before
hauling Africa
into the east because outsourcing
provides cheap labor
for tending livestock and slaughtering.
At night, the business of blood saturates
his dreams
and he wakes with a swelling taste for
another cut
craving meat more than a woman, who
surprisingly
is still attracted to him, well to his
affluence anyway,
despite his cascading frame –
belly stretched with sin – the flesh of over
two
hundred pounds per year per person
stuffed into pockets
of skin and soon he stops breeding. He
eats, and eats
alone. He gropes at the globe, his greasy
24
deliberate life
Disappointed to say the least
after countless art shows – tracked
interviews – read, loyal subscriber
to the quarterly confident that I could
count the steps
as she closed in on genius.
An Archetype of Art
art as art should be, striking up
in me more life than one could
breed in a womb
I would remind myself,
stagnant in my own. mess.
of colors.
Publicly poised dashing a hand about to
buyers,
admirers – I saw her at Whitman Gallery
she took leave into the ladies’ room
I followed and
found her snorting off the
vanity
I held the door for her.
Frustrated for believing that in the 21st
Century