It was Virginia, home to Smithfield

and there were so many choices
of pig. Hickory smoked sausage, ham-
hock, pork chop, and of course everybody’s
favorite Sunday serve-me-up
bacon. Our family believed in only one
kind of cooked pig and that was the kind
that came in strips, clung to each other well
like pigs, like pigs before
the slaughter but everyone knows this
was after and look at how they still
clung, adhered strip-to-strip
as though this might make them
whole again and oh, how nice of them
for planning to form such a natural
package. And it was

sometime post first grade, maybe second
when he arrived. A boy diving toward me
in the deep. It was summer as it always
is summer or near summer in Virginia
Beach and we had returned with our laminated
cards declaring our membership to the neighborhood
pool. I swam until my skin resembled the fruit
in my mother’s cupboard and then
swam some more, but in between there was he
and we approached the conversation
of bacon as children might approach carob
in search of chocolate and he told
me bacon was pig and all the other
ways of meat, how it turns up
on your plate grazing beside a field
of peas except it isn’t grazing
because it’s dead, because it’s dead
it’s meat and didn’t you know
and don’t you like to eat this.
And I did like to eat

this meat and I didn’t know all the ways
it was dead but could imagine
all the ways it lived and now
was dead, living in my belly.

*Natasha Kochicheril Moni, a first-generation American born to native Dutch and East Indian parents, grew up in Virginia Beach, VA. Her poetry has or will appear in Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review, Diner, Diagram, Verse, Willard & Maple and The Sierra Nevada College Review. In 2005, Natasha’s chapbook ms was a finalist in the Vincent Chin Memorial Prize sponsored by Kundiman and Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing.