Assistant Editor Emily Rose Cole: The formal cleverness of Allison Pitinii Davis’s “The Neighborhood Girls Sabotage the Dairy Queen Order” is hard to overstate. Davis teaches us to read the poem as it goes, deconstructing her own poem as the poem’s collective speaker, the Neighborhood Girls, deconstruct a hamburger. By the end, the poem has remade itself in the Neighborhood Girls’ collective image, recreating their small act of resistance. But what happens to the poem isn’t sabotage: instead we, the readers, witness firsthand how easily this collective be can reworked into something new, something less corporate than a Dairy Queen burger.
To hear Allison read the poem, click below:
The Neighborhood Girls Sabotage the Dairy Queen Order
The situation deteriorated rapidly as workers responded to company pressure by increasing their “sabotage.”
—Stanley Aronowitz, “Lordstown: Disruption of the Assembly Line” (1973)
The owner comes in, asks for a burger
and fries. Looks at us knowingly,
the thought of us
scurrying.
We start by leaving _ut the circles _f _ni_ns.
We replace the Ws of ketchup with caramel.
Then, [caramel]e tell him [caramel]e are _ut _f burgers,
is human flesh acceptable?
[Caramel]e say thank y_u that c_sts $1,_ _ _ .99.
Are y_u all high? he asks
quietly, as n_t t_ startle the cust_mers.
[Caramel]e say, n_ here is y_ur human flesh,
and he says [caramel]e are all fired,
but the next cust_mer
says, hey girls, make it t[caramel]_.
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and the Ohioana Book Award, and Poppy Seeds (KSU Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. Her work is forthcoming from Missouri Review.
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