Nocab
My mum wouldn’t eat bacon. God had said
you weren’t supposed to and so my dad
wrote it backwards on the shopping list.
That way the Jewish neighbours wouldn’t know
we bought the things they bought backwards too.
I liked it crisp, reddened, the fat browned
so you could crunch it, the rind a dark chewy
stripe, a mordant smear of mustard that stung
my mouth, with ketchup globs, sliced cucumber
– cool green, sweet red – a tomato fried black
at the edges, butter-soaked white toast.
God said you mustn’t have meat with milky things
but bacon wasn’t kosher so it didn’t matter.
When you had crunched, it had an undertaste –
animal, unclean – our foreign English breakfast.
Why really would you want to eat a pig?
I didn’t question why we ate animals at all.
Susan Jordan has an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and writes both poetry and prose. She has had poems published in several magazines and anthologies including The Journal, Obsessed with Pipework, Prole, Snakeskin, South and the Agenda online supplement.