A Holy Act

It was a ritual.

Ridgewood, Queens — New York City —
row houses, chain-link, and stoops.

My father was a hunter.

Every late November,
the basement stank of deer.
Not just meat — death.
The kind of smell that didn’t wash out —
filling every corner, every breath.

They’d hang the deer on the grape trellis in the backyard —
iron pipe, painted black —
built by my Nonno in the late 70s
to hold vines and summer shade,
where for years,
my father grew green grapes,
then later, kiwi from Zia’s Italian plant.

By fall,
it held carcasses,
hung from the necks,
tongues exposed,
guts slit and emptied.

Then came the procession
down into the basement,
hauling the weight to the table.

It wasn’t just any surface —
it was my parents’ first dining room table —
the one they bought in Brooklyn
when they were newly married,
now replaced and sent to the basement
to become a butcher’s slab each autumn.

That’s where the work happened.
The Polish neighbor —
thick hands,
eyes that knew where every cut went —
was a butcher by trade.

He didn’t speak much,
but his knife did.
Quick, practiced, indifferent.
The air down there was sharp.
Cold, wet, and full of iron.
It seeped in you, and it didn’t let go —
like some cold void,
like a raw ending.
A bucket for the organs.
Another for the hooves —
later shaped to hooks for the wall.

They carved out shoulders, loins,
filets, backstraps —
deep red, still vibrant,
with clean, white sinew.

Some kids had crisp fall games,
or leaf-strewn fields,
the older ones had the girls they dated.

I had ribcages cracking open,
the smell of cigarette smoke,
and men grunting
through the holy act of skinning.

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