Anointing

After the ceremony for my naming, my father plucked
the tongue out of the mouth of the roasted pig and held it

close to my own mouth. Of course my instinct was to suck
on it, unable to tell how this rough skin differed from that 

of the woman who took me to her breast after I was born.
He was exultant—believing my capacity to so eagerly root,

seek salt from flesh, sustenance from a leathery form,  a story 
from something pierced and singed and shorn then turned on a spit, 

meant I would command not only language but circumstance. 
I've wondered: is this why we ask our stories to wear meat 

on their bones, to drip with the lard and sauce of their origins, come
apart where they should at the seams or joints? More than once 

after this instance, I have been anointed. I have been intimate with 
a thing that was at first not my body, until it became part of me.