Poetry |

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Saltine”

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Saltine

 

1.

Perforations is what they are,

but I didn’t know that word,

not back then. No, we just said

holes — thirteen of them, set up

like the board of that Cracker

Barrel game with a jar of colored

pegs to kill the time and quiet us kids

until the waitress brought the eggs.

Stamped in the wood were

the results: leave two pegs and you’re

purty smart, it read, four or mor’n

you’re just plain eg-no-ra-moose.

Even then, I knew the score

for what it was — fun made

at how we talked, a joke for sale

in the gift store.

 

2.

Try and look: Not one

of those tiny salted peepholes

hardly lets you through to see

a thing. No, they were just big enough

for the boys to be boys, smashing together

a sandwich of them, peanut butter

made to look like thirteen worms,

like thirteen blackheads squeezed

from a pre-teen nose. Bashing jacks

is what they called it,

telling every boy that called

I couldn’t come to the phone

because I was in front of the mirror

again, doing exactly that.

 

3.

Holes were something

I knew, all those bull’s-eye

cans lined on the fence

not just shot up but riddled,

the spray of buck-shot

ever wider with every inch

he sawed from the barrel

of a shotgun kept

under mama’s bed. When

the smoke and ruckus

was too much, I’d hide

in a Model A forgotten

deep in the weeds, curl

into a nest of rusted

springs and animal hair

burst from the driver’s seat.

I’d test each little porthole

a bullet had made

in that old Ford, use my fingers

to dam the streams of light

bossing through doors

once made to close and keep

a passenger safe.

 

4.

What I didn’t know then was

the holes are intentional, made to keep

a cracker pumped with yeast

from pillowing up — without them,

that Depression-era mix of not much

more than white flour and baking soda

would have no crunch, no hard edges.

 

5.

My grandmother took them

with butter, the unsalted kind in a red

carton, the kind whipped

white and soft. How delicate

she’d make each bite with all the manners

she could muster, making herself into

a cotillion-trained girl taught

never to yankee up a slice

by slathering the whole thing at once

but to ready only what you can fit

in your mouth at a time,

buttering not the whole piece

but each individual bite, one by one.

 

6.

Hard to say if my grandfather tried

not to break them as he jammed

a pâté of finger-sausages onto

his, the kind of sausages named

for the city of Mozart but never

pronounced that way, not Vienna

but Vye-ee-nna, a mechanically separated

little tin of God-knows-what,

perfect for bait fishing and made

delicious with a dash of hot sauce.

On the boat, I’d draw

my knees up on the cooler, pass him

one link after the next, watch him take

one for himself, another

for the hook.

 

7.

Listen. There’s endless ways

to eat them, but the most basic choice

is this: salt side up or salt side down.

My tongue, always ready for a fight,

preferred the latter. Like the family

I love best, the bite is rough at first

but quickly goes soft, nearly falls apart

without even the need

to chew, not too unlike how I was taught

to take communion without the aggression

of teeth, letting what will forgive

dissolve on your tongue.

 

8.

My mama played

disco and ate hers with all kinds

of diet snacks, mostly cottage cheese,

but eventually a different something

could be found at the store, so she

brought home a taste of what

I’d never seen before: a cracker without

sharp edges, each scalloped and shaped

like a framed Victorian portrait on a wall.

I’d study them, say Townhouse, conjure

the brand name as if it might genie up

a place I’d live in some day with a pantry full

of fancy like this, each biscuit so burnished

it abandoned that factory-worker pallor

for something bronzed, something fresh

back from Miami in a white denim skirt.

 

9.

This is all to say

the first time I was called cracker

no one could’ve told me it was anything

than a jive made at what we ate,

and if it had anything to do with color,

it was only all those pale

waxed sleeves of those pale

crackers white enough to reflect

their nutritional content was that

of drywall. No one could’ve told me different,

convinced as I was it had everything to do

with the tan of those high-end crackers

we could hardly afford or regularly

find at our store.

 

10.

What I didn’t know then was

how an industry would one day make

a nostalgia of it all, how we’d become the punch-

line for those who would hardly make fun

of anyone else, white trash being dead last

in the race to make the workplace PC, a tough

case to make for difficult men who pass

as privileged without having much

to show for it at all. So the red-neck

roast keeps going, all those jokes

about funeral casseroles, green beans

on the stove so long the Jesus

is cooked right out of them, that slop

slopped together with cheese that’s not

really cheese, the kind that also comes in a box,

all of it topped with a crumble crust of

cheap. But I know what it’s like to swallow

it down when those new graves are dug,

just how long it takes for anything to grow

over that red gash in clay earth.

 

11.

Etymology says whip cracker,

and on my best days I see that exhausted

draught horse, sway-backed and crusted

with the black scat of fleas, some grandfather

from way back down the line plowing

those merciless fields and snapping

that stinging tip. Worse, I imagine

that obscene whip cracking over

another human being.

Once, when I asked my grandmother

where our people were from, she said

not to worry my pretty little head

cause we weren’t nothing but a bunch

of chicken thieves, meaning we were

poor, as in dirt, as in no pot to piss in

nor a window to throw the piss out,

meaning we were tenant farmers,

poor enough to hardly own

ourselves, much less anything or any-

one else. But still, it’s near impossible to

escape the report of that whip, to figure

who might have held it or what

back of what living being

was ripped to shreds.

 

12.

So screw Paula Deen and the clack

of her too-white teeth too big

for her foul mouth: what we made of simple

flour and water and salt was never meant

to be a show. In the clamor of it

all, we forgot how those plain crackers gentle

the stomach like nothing else can

when you’re sick, a bite to try

when nothing else will stay down. And mercy

if they don’t thicken even the most

watery soup, making the buy-one-get-one

from a can into something that might

actually fill you and keep you

from hunger.

 

13.

Believe me when I say

they’re still there at the bottom right

of the bottom shelf, and damn it

if they still cost less than just about anything

else at the store. And please: don’t tell me

how useful they are, how comforting still:

I remember: of course I know. I do.

I know. But I also know if too many are eaten

dry, the roof of my mouth will be torn

to rags, and rightly so. Worse, I’m ashamed.

And oh, how ashamed of how

ashamed I am. I roll my cart past now

without looking down to them, and never

do I buy them anymore.

 

*     *     *     *     *

This poem was originally commissioned by Rebecca Gayle Howell for an anthology response to a reissue of Don West’s Clods of Southern Earth forthcoming from the University of Kentucky Press.

Contributor
Nickole Brown

Nickole Brown is the editor of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and teaches periodically at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program, the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA, and the Hindman Settlement School. Her most recent collection of poems is Fanny Says (BOA Editions). She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC

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