Sean Thomas Dougherty
At the Rib Fest
My wife says let’s find the most wrecked crew
because wrecked people make the best ribs.
We passed the clean-cut boys with collared shirts
and the black crew from Texas with their professional
Pig Roasts until we found a crew from Columbus
where the lead guy handing out sugared bacon
had no teeth, like my wife, who long ago lost them
to disease and drinking. And so we said sure,
and we ordered a rack from the fat white kid
in a straw hat, and my autistic daughter
ate a piece of brown sugared bacon the crew lead
handed to her and then when we went to buy more bacon
the man refused to take our money. He was a small white man
in jeans and a t shirt. He had a southern Ohio accent
full of rolling r's like the kids I knew growing up
who’d moved up from Marietta or West Virginia
so their fathers could work in the factories of glass
and steel along the lake. He was sober
though the cooks looked bourbon bad.
We paid for our full rack and my daughter
took the bacon slabs and we hustled away amazed
at such good fortune. Maybe it was some kind
of Appalachian solidarity, maybe he could smell
the poverty in our blood, the long nightshifts
I work so we can buy meat, the lines on our faces,
"maybe because I'm so cute" my wife said,
maybe he recognized our daughter as disabled.
Disabled can get you things, this guy Danny
with Down Syndrome I used to take care of said.
In the smoke house
of the sky distant storm clouds billowed.
Black and white people wiped the grease
from their jowls. Sauce stained napkins blew
like omens at our sneakers. A clown handed out
animal balloons. A few drops of rain fell,
and my daughter started to shriek
because she claims she’s blind
when water gets on her glasses.
I put my baseball cap on her head.
Her voice sharp and brittle as glass
she will smash against the wall
during her worst episodes.
In the smoke house of the world
we wander blind in so many directions,
even the smallest kindness
like a few free pieces of sugared bacon is suspect.
Why did he give the bacon to us,
my daughter kept perseverating? She needed an answer.
What could I tell her? Something about hunger.
How hard it is these days to tell kindness
from guilt or shame. You look then look away.
What will kill us or save us in the end?
This I know she's learned already: we take what meat is given;
we swallow its tough fatty sweetness down fast
as if someone will snatch it from our hands.
