Patrick Riedy, featured in the new Ocean State Review

Mecone Trick

The bone-busied dish; my lip swailing, forehead sudor.
While I gnawed the drumette Prometheus flensed integument.
Crisp and greased, they’re arranged in a mandala with celery.
Cornish, their white plumes and torch of comb;
roosts of them fattened and feathered and cut up.
When young, we would take-out over rotary,
cord coiled around the index, barely old enough to not bellyup,
whimpering add-ons to Bella order as Frank’s heart felt dire.
Now, East of Erie, dusted in wicked flour and crumb,
New Englanders damp their wings to heap: I see scraggly hipsters
addle the blue-cheese, sauce-tossed gorge of heritage
and feel my breed that openly eats caveman in some dim barroom,
like lore or tramp swollen round the gut, dear to me. Earnestly they sit
glistened like the sacrifice. Skin and meat for bone.

Patrick Riedy on “Mecone Trick“:

A quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman hangs in my kitchen which reads “There is no love sincerer than the love of food” and I think that tends to be true. I love food, perhaps more than I should and I have spent many a day on a barroom stool with a pile of wings in front of me. In that way I suppose this poem is a love poem, an ode of sorts, to the delicacy of my hometown– Buffalo chicken wings, or chicken wings, or simply wings as we call them.

I also think this is a poem born of some frustration for me, since I can’t for the life of me understand why it is so difficult for the rest of this country to make a serviceable wing. If it is fried well enough then the sauce is garbage, or if the sauce is spot on then they go ahead and cover it with soggy breading. Perhaps the worst is when it is served with barely servicable blue cheese or, heaven forbid, ranch.

If I remember correctly I was reading a lot of Seamus Heaney while writing this, so place and shared cultural touchstones were top of mind. Perhaps tipping my hat too much, I drew plenty of inspiration from Heaney’s poem “Oysters.” His poem got me thinking about my life here in New England and how I’d swapped chicken bones for oyster shells. I love food you eat with your hands and both of these delicacies provide a visceral experience. I thought about how there is something wonderfully grotesque and shameful about eating these things and went from there.

Once I worked in the fancy Greek myth business of Prometheus and the Trick at Mecone the poem sorted itself out. The fire of Franks hot sauce as much a gift to humanity as the fire Prometheus returned to us, is it not? And how the pile of bones when you finish a plate of wings just sit there like an offering to the waitstaff gods. And then I thought to myself that, really, it is me and my kind glistened with the skin and fat of these things—happy and full—that might be the true sacrifice.

Patrick Riedy earned his MFA from Brown University, where he received the Academy of American Poets Prize and the Edwin Honig Memorial Award. Originally from Buffalo, NY, he now resides in Cranston, RI and he works as a grants specialist in Brown’s School of Public Health Additional work can be found in The Common as well as previous issues of The Ocean State Review.