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.