Willamette Valley Meat Cutter

By Jack Joseph Smith

WILLAMSTTE VALLEY MEAT CUTTER The deer was slain by the wolfmen They had the finest technological equipment CP Pour wheel drive-and night battery light With a telescopic’ sight ment for stars, that caught a beed'on eyes of gold WITHOUT A CAMERA Their minds were head tripping on film Through’ a power: astronomicelly more-cutting Upon the explosive take While -their-pin-head ‘vision had mismanaged “steel” from high-powered ‘magmm rifles - ON SPEEDS that would not even whistlesss Also mismenaged was the absence of a true-Imnter's - (heart to heart- balance) Which made the world of the wind” ‘an absolute chewed up rew While the HITS on the carcass- were-a flash of wet shattered” b-o-n-e-s *HEYt Ye-ain't got-no more WHISKEYS" (Why--it wouldn't be sane* to leave-it up to -hangs with us fell'ers in the truck without any good grain luck) And SHOOTING a ZOOM of a FRAE we see * Smooth sheep skin gloves * On a Long Shot? Let's get right-on no framevork at all To the wife with no waste of bloody time? No, they brought the body to me and I doubble quartered cleaned it In a sink with a good sucking drain While their boots made judgement on the purple sawdust Pale white the sink with gray cracks The blood clots went fron plue to red Then the misty steam turned to ve blackened in the beneath of the besin
And as I rubted with a rivet stitched tovels and on a long clean calcium tinmd nail, picked with the beak of my hand (hardly at ell boys - ye! might recall) very little meat remained whole: While we ecimowledzed the bones ~ shoving their jags - to the tooth of an eye Yet to add to my 31,80 per hour on the elastic sense of a sacrifice to two Saint Bernard dogs in keepseke for Hapoy French and Cocaine Irish vanierers; I conjured up on the scrap meat I could get While, the big bellied boss, who had been cutt'en from Ohio to Alesina, kept right on smiling through the death r-o-t-t-e-d betveen his money t-e-e-t-h Just cause he'd give any crazy enough man credit; he didn't amuse me at the moment (Te it's to bad old sonny, then it's to bad young daddy) Though I had to hand it to him like a country mans: Two weeks past these millvorker mmters - who I lmew then wern't logzers - Had come in to turn over paydey for what they had already done in the hay and I had ‘signaled my minisoo out from the back-room hard-wood cutting-tatile: - To watch the notion of the Bossman quite capable mosy about in the front shop; . while he eniled these boys along the shelvesios This time as a bunch they hed bought in bulk - on the line with no time - $400.00 worth of canned goods after alls the BSossmen, wouldn't expect them to go on a hunt in the woods without a chemical preservitive along for dinners xcw I told ister Bossman with a personal smile Broadly outloud “for the dogs" While his SHIE'= ON fece, revealed what he believed - That I did the operation For my own selva, £ pp,

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A narrative poem set in a rural Oregon butcher shop where the speaker processes a deer killed by reckless hunters, exposing the gap between technological hunting equipment and genuine woodsmanship while cataloguing the economics of labor, canned goods, and the boss's predatory smile.

The poem's power lies in its accumulation of physical detail — the sink, the blood clots, the purple sawdust, the calcium-limed nail — which makes the violence of the hunt inseparable from the commerce of the shop.

Claude

This is a working-class epic disguised as anecdote — the meat cutter's $1.80-an-hour hands do what the hunters' high-powered magnum rifles could not: make sense of the kill. The 'wolfmen' with their four-wheel drives and telescopic sights meant for stars arrive without a camera, without a true hunter's 'heart to heart balance,' and the deer is shattered bone by the time it reaches the sink. The speaker's quiet competence — rubbing with rivet-stitched towels, picking with the beak of his hand — stands as moral counterweight to the boss's money-teethed grin and the millworkers' $400 in canned goods.

The poem's most subversive gesture is its ending: the boss believes the speaker did the butchering for himself, but the speaker had already told him 'for the dogs.' The misreading is the point — labor is always misread by those who profit from it.