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Over and Over Again

Janet Kuypers
5/3/12

So I work here at the front of the store
and every ten minutes in the afternoon
a young man walks from the deli section
wearing his work cap and apron,
and drops off a sealed container
with eight pieces of fried chicken
to set with other, once seaming,
buckets of fried chicken for sale.
He comes back fifteen minutes later
with a few plastic containers
of whole rotisserie chicken
to stack in pyramids
next to the buckets of fried chicken.

And it makes me think:
does this young man go back and forth
between always baking ovens
and vats of always bubbling grease
to cook the same bird flesh
over and over again?

I mean, does this deli at this store
get large bags of same-sized chickens,
pre-plucked, gutted and prepped,
so they could just place them in the ovens
before placing each identical once-living bird
into it’s own mass-produced
sealable plastic shell?

Do they get vats of chicken parts
already breaded for the fryer,
or do they get gallon jugs of batter
they have to dump the chicken parts into first?

...I’m sure they don’t get their hands dirty
with batter: welcome to the corporate machine.
Mass-produce dead animal parts somewhere else.
Just deliver them to the deli,
give the dead animal parts enough heat
and leave it at that.

Then do they have to appropriately separate,
to evenly distribute, the animal parts
in each bucket of friend chicken?
Get the beast to wing to leg rations right...

Toward the end of the day, if some animals
haven’t sold, they just throw them away.
Mass slaughtered animal, cooked and not sold,
is then thrown away. Now, I wouldn’t suggest
they give all of their food to homeless shelters,
but at the same time, people go hungry,
and this store daily throw away food
that could help a family survive another day.

I mean, I work here at the front of the store,
and this is what I’m dawn to think of:
a man in a deli, spending hours a day
opening and closing the same oven doors,
moving breaded animal parts into
and out of deep fat fryers
over and over again.

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