With his band, the Glory Fires, the Alabama native Lee Bains has long made music that sets out to catechize, celebrate, and complicate his Southern heritage—a project that extends to Bains’s freewheeling poetic sequence “Work Lunch,” which focusses not only on the food that sustains us but also on what, and who, makes such sustenance possible. This cycle of poems has the power of music, with an everyday elation that recalls the late Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Coney Island of the Mind.” This is fitting, given Bains’s consideration of the carnival of cuisine that is the American South and which, indeed, composes our national diet—one that can careen wildly between homemade wonders, meat-and-three restaurants, and the familiar comforts and horrors of a “national fast-food entity.” He finds a feast of contradiction, too, in “the farmers’ market, / the locally grown section, / the organic superstore, / all worse.” Bains praises the working man’s lunch while commenting on both work and manhood, slyly referring to other lunch poems that don’t acknowledge where our daily bread comes from.
As on his band’s 2014 album, “Dereconstructed,” Bains cuts a sweeping historical view with self-conscious reflection, taking pleasure in Southern traditions like barbecue and storytelling, and taking pains to describe being “stranded on the great shipwreck of Atlanta” while having “too much education / too little work / too much time / too little cash.” Though written before the COVID-19 pandemic, “Work Lunch” feels all the more crucial as farm, restaurant, grocery, delivery, and other food workers continue to toil amid threats to health, financial security, and wholeness. The labor that Bains foregrounds, although officially deemed “essential,” remains too often overlooked; his poetry is a way of giving thanks when thanks is the least we might offer.
Paired here with photographs by the Atlanta-based artist Nydia Blas, Bains’s verse cascades across the page, reminiscent of mid-twentieth-century poetry’s composition by field—a practice lately left fallow. What Bains seeks, even as he critiques gluttony and greed, hunger and hypocrisy, is plenty. In this ironic ballad of beauty, against a “faux-stone, faux-stucco” landscape of “screens and machines,” the question a friend poses is existential, urgent, and outright funny: “How is it . . . / That you always wind up paying less than me, / But getting way more food?”
—Kevin Young
Meat-and-Threes
Read by the author.
Chitlins, my Grandmama said,
was something that,
even in the depths of the Depression,
they wouldn’t eat.
My Grandmama talked about living off of
livers and gizzards and poke salad,
sassafras tea and chicory root.
About chewing every bite thirty times
before you swallowed.
About drinking a whole glass of water right before you ate
and a whole glass right after.
About the can of hardening fatback grease
that would sit on the glassless windowsill
and render unto them by rationed mounds
the only trace of protein they often got.
About how her daddy told her,
you may be poor,
but at least you ain’t Black.
The first time I ate chitlins
was at the same place my brother first ate chitlins, back
when he worked at the discount paint store, and the boss
had railed him out for fucking up the paint, because you
had to match a three-quarter can of old white
with a quarter can of old yellow
to make cream, and had
to make sure the raggedy old
can lid clamped down good
or you’d throw paint everywhere
when you mixed it,
and his co-worker felt bad for him, so he took him to lunch.
At the Quick Split.
And they both got chitlins.
Otherwise, the food was like my Grandmama’s,
the crunchy okra
the porky tender greens
the moist crusty cornbread
the syrupy soft sweet potatoes
the salty plump black-eyed peas.
The Quick Split closed one day without warning.
Its hand-painted sign had read “Chitterlings”
and “Steamtable”
and “Since 19-something.”
I think I remember.
I can’t find any pictures on the Internet.
My brother heard the landlord had jacked up the rent,
as they had up and down the forlorn blocks.
From the other side of the mountain,
something called a restaurant group
installed a franchise into the old space.
It couldn’t have been scarcely cold yet.
They called it “Soul Kitchen.”
I’m told the soul is what is left when a body dies.
Up on the Northside,
Niki’s has long towered over the other meat-and-threes,
a Colossus of rambling dining rooms and spacious
parking lots,
its Odyssean steamtable long enough,
it seems, that if you brought your eye to a level
with the Greek catfish, you could observe the
curvature of the earth somewhere around the
congealed salad.
There, between those anointed golden hours of eleven and two,
you will spy clay-spackled work trucks
and glimmering imported sedans,
austere brutalist cop cruisers
and candy-coated whimsical donks.
As fine-tuned its assembly line of seasoned tablemen
(“Hello, sir, what’ll you have?”),
as open as its doors,
as efficient as its headset-wearing hosts,
the prices have crept up, and the work trucks get fewer.
In the fluorescent void of the grocery store,
we examine the bunches of collards,
the bags of okra.
Grown in Honduras.
Grown in California.
Do they eat okra in Honduras?
Do they eat collards in California?
We double-check the price.
They must have flown them over first class.
The farmers’ market,
the locally grown section,
the organic superstore,
all worse.
In Birmingham, meat-and-threes are hard to avoid.
In Atlanta, they are hard to find
unless you count the couple of tourist traps,
bedecked with soft-focus paintings of
bloodless plantation homes,
the metallic sheen on black-and-white
photos of smiling politicians,
their hands hidden, presumably
into the pockets of the poor
motherfuckers slinging soap
and boiling oil in the back,
or rushing out plates
(what meat-and-three
does table service?)
for two dollars and thirteen cents
an hour, which will get you
a plate of liver and onions,
so long as the year is 1928,
or the glass-and-steel simulacra
in the bottoms of skyscrapers
that claim elevation
but practice degradation,
truffle oil in the peas,
rice vinegar in the greens,
some sort of compote on the goddamned cornbread,
a corporate-account cafeteria
in the guise of high culinary art.
But there is Something Special.
That is its name,
Something Special.
As I kneel down to inspect the warped track
of the sliding door at the guard shack,
reaching for a pry bar or maybe a flathead,
R.B. forks mouthfuls from a styrofoam tray.
“Lee, I know you’re from Alabama.
You like soul food?”
He tells me about Something Special.
I have seen it.
It had looked closed.
An old Shoney’s maybe,
burglar bars in the windows.
It is the place I go to swim
in her broad smile and sweetness and
scent of patiently tended gravy,
to squeeze into a booth,
and set my sweat-streaked
hat onto the seat beside me,
to disappear into the golden snap
of a freshly fried porkchop
and the peppered twang of greens
and long cold drafts of sweet velvet-rich tea,
to lavish oxtails on myself,
their fatty drippings mingling with
cornbread for a dangerous price.
(I have heard that the restaurant groups
and supply chains and commodity
markets have done their work.)
It is the place we seek out
sustenance in the thick
of the burnt-neck dogdays,
shelter in the throes
of ditch-digging Decembers.
We eat until
finally
we breathe,
our legs lain up on the boothseat,
our backs leaned against the wall,
watching the snow-flecked
soap operas quietly
unspool on the
TV perched
over by the
condiments.
It is the only place in this city
somebody has ever asked me,
“Where you been?”
Local Fast-Food Entity
Read by the author.
How is it,
he squints,
looking down at his tray
and then over at mine,
that you always wind up paying less than me,
but getting way more food?
I tarry.
Rocking back on my heels
once I step inside the door,
just close enough to make out the menu—
the neat little rows of à la carte,
the red-white-and-blue explosions of combos,
daily specials,
manager’s specials,
limited-time offers,
a mere greenback for
three more squirts from the soda fountain—
but far enough back to stay out of the line.
(“No ma’am, I’m not in line.”)
In this dingy
red-formica and particle-board
relic of America’s great glimmering disposable mid-century,
a time Atlanta loves to recall,
a time Atlanta loves to revise,
razing the red-brick complexes of redlined,
rent-gouged Black folks,
condominiumizing the mills whose machines chewed up
the cotton and timber and hands and limbs of
the refugees from places like Ellijay and Tallapoosa,
polishing the glass and chrome and neon that
issued its sunny proclamations to the salivating, cash-fat world
that this,
with its overpasses and skyscrapers shielding
investors and benefactors from the shotgun-shacks
and barefoot children and police roundups,
was a city too busy to hate,
the chicken is higher than it is down the street.
Does the carefully branded national entity
down the street have a lock on the chicken plants,
and on the trucks we see hauling their harvest?
Are they the chicken plants I have heard tell of?
From Bobby, when he was on work release?
(A sinister name for something somebody
begs for release from.)
That left him whooped and broke,
and still at the mercy of the state?
That reduced him for years to gagging at
the sight of a wing or a leg?
From Juan Diego, whose wife was left to their
air-strangling waves of gore
whenever he got picked up,
trying to piece together nothing into
rent and baby food.
From Amy Goodman, explaining
how the ICE troopers invaded
little Morton, Mississippi,
and rounded up its people,
a year after Koch Foods
was forced to pay out
millions for grabbing,
hitting, robbing the women there.
A year after Koch Foods
was forced to pay out
two hundred grand for
endangering the people
of little Salem, Ohio.
A year plus seven weeks
since ICE troopers invaded
little Salem, Ohio,
and rounded up its people.
Does the L.E.D.-lit, faux-stone, faux-stucco national entity
down the street pay the folks relaying grub and words,
couple-three jobs at once, facing screens and machines,
like these ladies get paid?
Most have been here since I moved here, and
I have grown accustomed to their voices
and their petnames:
babydoll
honey
sweetheart
my friend
and to their facial expressions through the drive-thru window
or over the red-formica countertop:
eyes blank at peak hours
lips pursed in annoyance at a manager
eyebrows raised in recognition of a live one in the lobby
whole faces scrinched in bubbling laughter at a joke
muttered down the line.
They have closed another location,
its long-dulled chrome and flickering neon and bleary glass,
all set to sparkling anew by a national entity,
proclaiming its business to the cash-strapped
stragglers on Ponce de Leon, hiding the
sweetheart-chicken-deals, the
mounting rents, the ICE
raids, the tax breaks,
the hobbling
wages.
How is it,
he squints,
looking down at his tray
and then over at mine,
that you always wind up paying less than me,
but getting way more food?
Barbecue Spots
Read by the author.
We are a triumvirate of shit-headed cracker boys.
Too much education
too little work
too much time
too little cash.
Stranded on the great shipwreck of Atlanta,
lost,
unknown,
alone,
hunting for each other.
Today we are hunting for barbecue.
Among the glistening scaffolded towers and the scraped-out shells of stripmalls,
there isn’t any here. Not like home.
Not like what grows on the corners of crossroads
among the Northwest Alabama floodplains,
or along the two-lanes weaving through the Middle Georgia woods,
or up through the cracks between Birmingham’s warehouses and machine shops.
There was Harold’s,
with its long-simmering, ancient Brunswick stew,
its Georgia-fine pork, the texture of the ropy sawdust that unspools when a dull blade chews up a rained-on board,
wetted down with the sharp bite of vinegar and pepper.
But Harold’s is dead.
Its boarded doorway watches the guards’ trucks enter and exit the gates of the penitentiary across the street.
There, some Cuban boys quit eating at one point.
They were sick of being treated like cattle, like swine, in a country they were told was free.
They overturned the tables in the cafeteria.
They snatched up the guards with shivs to their necks.
They, too, are dead.
Here, in this city that fancies itself parentless, deathless,
it is a mirage of smoke,
a food-court cartoon
or a boutique betrayal,
microwaved rubber
or cutely spiced roast,
a mechanized feed trough
streamlined from some distant boardroom
or a precious experiment
secretly funded by somebody’s daddy,
too high
or way too damn high.
But Seth has found a book.
Was it at the thrift store?
In a musty box of his Pawpaw’s old things?
(His Pawpaw is dead.)
It is the South’s best barbecue according to a noted
expert in the Year of Our Lord 1992.
Atlanta boasts a measly two listings.
One is Harold’s.
Harold’s is dead.
The second is Aleck’s Barbecue Heaven.
Its very name, its presence on the page, sets our faces tingling.
Under its listing is a quote.
“I have eaten barbecue all over the world,” it begins,
“and Aleck’s is the best barbecue in the world.”
So saith,
a collective gasp,
the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
We are inflamed,
rushing west toward that sainted corner of the city,
where King and Carmichael,
Lewis and Bond
plotted, planned, pontificated, prophesied
for an Atlanta reborn.
On the phone,
our blue arrow nears the red arrow.
We are on familiar ground.
We grow anxious.
We have never noticed Aleck’s before.
This is cause for concern.
We crane our necks out the windows.
Perhaps it is nestled in between the new stripmalls
and the grand old houses,
now lawyers’ offices and funeral homes.
The phone draws us into the depths of the great parking lot
that sprawls and spins its way away from the looming
stuccoed fortification that houses the new supercenter.
The phone declares us arrived.
We sit, staring, silent,
the car idling on a piece of the still-black asphalt lot,
under which, we can presume,
lies the foundation of the pit
that fed this land’s sacred people’s movement
the best barbecue in the world.
This place has just opened.
I am the scout.
E-Bo and Allen expect a report.
Is it high? Do they give you enough?
(It wasn’t too bad. And, yeah, they do.)
They is a pair of white-bearded men
who had run an after-hours barbecue joint
in Detroit,
who had decided to come back to
the land of their ancestry,
a repatriation in smoke.
They have the firm courteous manner
of military men,
and heap the fire-browned
vinegar-edged meat
dutifully, solemnly onto
the white buns.
It is in the space next to the foodmart of a filling station.
It was built to be disused, one imagines.
Everything is clean,
the walls freshly white
the chrome all shining
the tables unstreaked
but the air is gray.
I nearly choke
and smile.
The guy in front of me in line,
whose senses have sent him
the same alert at
the same time,
says plainly, “It smells like Birmingham in here.”
“That’s exactly what I was sitting here thinking,”
I offer.
“Are you from Birmingham?”
“Naw,” he muses. Bored. Waiting.
“I just know what it smells like.”
Sandwich
Read by the author.
“It comes down to personal responsibility,”
I remember my kinsman glaring,
the chatter of the buffet indifferent to his rage.
“Look at Grandmama. She grew up with nothing.
Whatever Granddaddy and them had, they lost in
the Depression. But they farmed their own food,
made clothes out of sacks.”
Grandmama is tight-lipped,
looking out onto the Superhighway.
Far west of there were the woods
where her daddy tried to farm
the sorry coal-seamed hollers,
and preached to the U.M.W.A.
boys who fought for
every scrap from
U.S. Steel.
A short mile east were the red-brick ranch house, the
green yard studded with spindly black pine trees,
bought by my Granddaddy and a G.I. loan
and a grateful nation.
(I don’t suppose the nation was grateful
for what Dante’s granddaddy did over in Korea,
or Tisha’s daddy did over in Vietnam.)
It is my personal responsibility
to climb in the van,
pull the sack of whitebread, peanut butter, bananas
from the shady spot on the floorboard,
to smear this peanut butter on this whitebread,
to cut up the bananas into little circles,
to unfasten the paper clip from the bag
of chips.
The store over by work is a national bargain-center entity.
It is owned by something called an investment manager,
headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
It is next to a 24-hour laundromat and a thrift store and an African Hair Supply.
It does an annual $4,000,000,000 in sales.
It will be closed due to insufficient profits in 14 months.
There are no lettuce or tomatoes.
Sometimes there are apples.
There are usually bananas.
I figure in my head, one loaf, one jar, one bunch.
About $2.50 a meal.
Damn.
I forget about the chips.
About $3.30 a meal.
Sitting in the van, gumming a sandwich,
I think about the hamburgers
from the national entity around the corner.
I can get two cheeseburgers, no, two double-cheeseburgers
for $3.50.
At the truckstop, two hot dogs are $3.
Grandmama loved hot dogs.
They were her favorite food.
Even when Granddaddy would offer
to take her to the Bright Star or
the Red Lobster, she’d usually just
rather a good hot dog and some potato chips.
When she and her mama and daddy and sisters and brothers
had picked the crops, and her daddy had sold them,
and had paid the landowner, and had paid the store,
he would try to give her a dime for to go to the picture show.
She was the baby.
She would walk those dusty miles
down to the picture show.
She usually didn’t have shoes then.
This was the Twenties. The Depression
hadn’t even hit yet.
She would clutch the dime in her tight little hand,
feeling the smooth cool of the plated silver
and the wings on the side of Lady Liberty’s head.
She would come to reach the pasture that,
in warmer months, would be transformed
into the expansive prairies of the Wild West,
the glittering ballrooms of New York City,
the dark stony castles of France,
the sun-swept courtyards of Arabia.
Out there at the edge of the field,
the heat of the dwindling summer would die with
the dusk. Daddy would come along to fetch
her later, and carry her home. Now, she
watched the first stars and deepening
blue enfold the great white screen.
She walks up to the man in the pine-box,
tip-toes at the counter and hands him her dime.
She asks him, please sir,
a cold coke and a hot dog.
National Fast-Food Entity
Read by the author.
I remember hearing one time
that Andy Warhol described heaven
as a little isolation booth
where you could watch cable TV—
any show you wanted—
with a little slot that would produce
whatever you wanted to eat.
Whatever you want.
To silently. Wordlessly. Consume.
I have scored the one parking spot under the shade-tree.
I am sodden with sweat.
My isolation chamber is broken, on account of the windows
I had to roll down,
but I do gnaw on the value platter
and pantingly watch the little screen
that I perch on the dash.
It is a film by Adam Curtis
about the isolation of our individualist age.
“The Century of the Self.”
Weeks later, I am dog-tired,
and labor-whipped. I dug a ditch all morning,
dropped my shovel before lunch,
ran to get the muchachos some tile,
nearly ran out of fuel in traffic,
no time for lunch,
got back to my ditch
and disappeared into it
by six o’clock.
Now, I am fluttering, flickering,
able to think of nothing but a value platter
and my booth of solitude.
On the horizon, a crowd of red shirts and visors
envelops the blind disinterested building,
that faint, distant cackle of the megaphone,
picket signs, yellow and white and red, hoisted up:
FIGHT FOR 15
LIVING WAGE NOW
WE ARE WORTH MORE
I approach the turn-in to the drive-thru,
ease off the gas,
lower the window,
honk the horn,
raise my fist,
drive on by.
Not on our watch.
We are worth more.
