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Bunghole

I sat today with the intention of writing a fascinating (of course!) essay about how I ripped up the disused tomato plants from our garden tonight. About how I chucked dozens of rotted bodies of fruit, bloated by nighttime frost. About how I hacked at the twine that had bound the plants to the posts with a retractable blade, allowing the great vines to swoon to the ground. About how our mutually-beneficial relationship has ended. We are the tomato plants’ creator, protector, and ultimately the destroyer; with no great effort, we tug its defunct roots from the soil and crumple the vines into the Yard Waste bin.

My essay didn’t progress as planned. I lost my focus somewhere between answering emails, making dinner, and running various domestic errands. Aw, shit, I hate to evoke the prose of Woolf so cavalierly, but  “Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.

Having failed at poetry for tonight, instead I bring you… Bunghole Liquors, of Peabody, Massachusetts. What a surrendipitous discovery, to be driving down the road and happen upon a typical nondescript package store called Bunghole Liquors. I forced Mr. P to pull over to take a picture, even though he could not comprehend why. “In dictionary English, a bunghole is the pouring hole in a liquor barrel,” I explained. “But doesn’t ‘bunghole’ just sound like it should mean something a helluva lot dirtier than that?”

I was a little disappointed when the Internet told me that the proprietors of Bunghole Liquors were fully cognizant of their establishment’s unsavory double entendre; their website boasts of the slogan “We’re not #1 butt we’re right up there” and offers a good selection of merchandise riffing on bunghole’s slang meaning. Which is rather coarse and low-class, if you ask me. The opposite of poetry.

Posted in Massachusetts.

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