Artwork © Robert Fleming
The Ham Factory
I worked in the Ham Factory for a while. Everyone did. The place stank. Every day a fresh semi-trailer full of pigs would back into the slaughter chute and the pigs would scream in nearly human voices “Save me! Save me!” as they came trotting down the ramp. They of course would eventually be shot with a bolt gun and turned into ham. It was the order of things, and there was nothing I could do about it. There were ladies who worked in the offices who never saw the pigs, and that’s fine. The ladies could wear their pretty dresses and cut our checks and the wind would smell sweet on Sundays.
I worked as a pig counselor at the Ham Factory. I would talk to the pigs and try to make them feel better about becoming ham. For instance, I would say, “Good Morning, Dorothy. How are you?” And she would say something like, in her nearly human pig voice, “Oh, I just got back from visiting my Uncle’s in Australia and we had a wonderful time.” And I would say, “That’s nice. But shouldn’t we admit that you are a pig and have never really been to Australia?” “I suppose you are right, Rusty,” she’d say and off she would trot. Next! It wasn’t a difficult job. There was a young woman named Rhonda who worked in the offices. I liked to talk to her. She wore wonderful rose print dresses, and she smelled sweet. We’d meet for lunch and eat our ham sandwiches and talk about the leaves flickering in the trees.
Rustin Larson’s writing appears in the anthologies Wild Gods (New Rivers Press, 2021) and Wapsipinicon Almanac: Selections from Thirty Years (University of Iowa Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, Puerto Del Sol, The Penn Review, North American Review, and Poetry East. His latest collection is Russian Lullaby for Brother Donkey (Alien Buddha Press, 2024).
Robert Fleming is a gay-man, word-artist, and scientist born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada who emigrated to Lewes, Delaware, United States. Robert follows his mother as a visual artist and his grandfather as a poet. In 1986 he published the second psychological research study on gay men’s response to AIDS in United States. Then, in the 1990s he was a contributing member of the District of Columbia’s Triangle Artist group. Now Robert is a founding member and contributing editor of Devil’s Party Press’ Old Scratch Press.