Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946; emigrated to the United

Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946; emigrated to the United States in 1966; became a U.S. citizen in 1981; is a poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, a columnist on National Public Radio, and editor of Exquisite Corpse, a literary journal at www.corpse.org.

E.U., OR THE POETRY OF MENUS

for Mark Steinberg

and in Champagn-Urbana

at Bacaro
with Bulgarian historian, Hungarian sociologist,
midwestern ethno-musicologist,
host Slavicist
and Korean minder
( I go nowhere without them)
I am introduced to a wholly new
part of the cow: "hanger steak"
hitherto unknown but tenderer
the native menu poet claims than filet mignon
better than the boar also on the menu
shot in Texas by George W.
and garnished with blue red and white
tendrils or mushrooms!
I lost you at the tendrils, poet.
The Slavicist: me, by the mushrooms.
The poetry of menus grows more complex
and its performers are the envy of the world
and when the cow's newly discovered
"hanger steak" (somewhere between
shoulder and flank, how it slipped by
all these years I can't imagine) arrives
it is small and compact and firm on its
bed of dime-sized burned potato chips
it is tender awright but not more tender
than filet mignon or boar or anything
tenderized by pounding and marinating
& I ask the Bulgarian historian
How are our socialist pigs different
from all other pigs? Why, they have more parts,
she says, and they surrender them more willingly.
Bingo. And the European Union wants
Romanian pigs sedated, a culturally
and gastronomically unwise move
in a country where the taste of terror
is worth the whole price of admission
and the poetry of menus still an oral form