Page 48

By Jack Joseph Smith

Severe As country Quiet as lead Less careful than cows Mistaking watchfulness for a dream No ordinary pick up The left over food would be the best there could be The upside was delicious The down side dangerous No one here likes intruders Hunger is not there area Pleasure is there thing Well we had a Dego among us He once walked through the door when he sold it before doing it We were trapped at the dumpster The first thing I thought was, how the alley smelled so good I saw there anger was as simple, as a button lost on a date So I told them there was already a body in the garbage, and in their tiping bend, in the city you have the first time I shived a pig, And was gone

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

Dumpster hunger, intrusion, alley smell, and quick anger give the poem the tense comedy of a threat remembered at close range.

The page turns scarcity, leftover food, intrusion, and alley memory into a blunt account of threat and pleasure. Its slur and violent garbage imagery make the recollection socially ugly as well as physically tense.

Claude

'Severe As country' begins with short similes, 'Quiet as lead / Less careful than cows', then follows a group scavenging, where 'The left over food / would be the best / there could be' and 'No one here likes intruders'. Trapped at the dumpster, the speaker notices 'how the alley smelled so good', sees anger 'as simple, / as a button lost on a date', tells them 'there was already a body / in the garbage', and recalls 'the first time I shived a pig, And was gone'.

The poem sets rural plainness against an urban scene of hunger, territorial pleasure and threat, with the handwritten 'in the city' making that setting explicit. Its short, flat lines and deadpan similes make violence and ethnic slur sound casual, which is part of the unease. The ending escapes rather than resolves, with the speaker simply gone.