Joshua Seigal’s “Tenacious” looks at first like a small comedy about a definition. The speaker has told someone that “tenacious” means tough; days later, at a restaurant, that person calls a steak tenacious, and the speaker silently objects: a person may be tenacious, but an “inanimate slab of flesh” surely cannot. The poem then turns, mid-conversation, into something much larger. It becomes a meditation on what matters more than words — the fact that someone survived. Its central idea is not grammatical; it is emotional: after hearing what the beloved has endured, the speaker hands over the power to define.
The construction feels like thinking as it happens. A single block of unrhymed free verse lets the lines move from the restaurant table to the walk home without a formal break. The rhythm is conversational, with lines of uneven length that follow the speaker’s meandering attention. The pivotal moment arrives in the middle of a line: “absorbed in this. Then as we held hands.” The full stop inside the line is the poem’s hinge. Everything before it belongs to the speaker’s small, comic pedantry; everything after it belongs to an unnamed disclosure. Later, a similar line break isolates the word “knew”: “I felt your hand in mine, and knew / that you were still alive.” For a moment the sentence seems to end with knowledge alone, before the meaning of that knowledge arrives: the beloved is alive. That “still” is one of the poem’s most important words. It hints at danger, survival and a past that could have led somewhere else.
Diction and imagery do much of the emotional work. The early phrase “an inanimate slab of flesh” is deliberately blunt, even off-putting. It is a steak, but it is also flesh, and once the beloved speaks of “what happened and what he did,” the word “flesh” begins to carry an uneasy bodily weight. The speaker does not explain what “he” did. That absence is powerful: the poem refuses to turn trauma into easy detail. Instead, it stays with the speaker’s response. The held hand becomes the poem’s true proof of tenacity, a small act of holding on. “Tenacious” itself means tending to hold fast, and by the final lines the word has shifted from the speaker’s dictionary to the couple’s linked hands.
The closing lines build into something like a prayer. The repeated “You can” — “You can call a piece of meat tenacious... You can do whatever you like... You can recreate the very foundations of Being” — grants the beloved a sweeping, almost divine authority. The capitalized “Being” is a philosophical word; it pushes the poem beyond a simple apology. The speaker is no longer correcting language but kneeling before it. The final question, “And if I want to worship you as a god / then how, I pray, could that be wrong?” is only partly metaphorical. It completes the reversal: the one who once taught a definition now becomes a worshipper.
What makes the poem significant is the generosity of that reversal. It takes an ordinary moment — someone misusing a word — and shows how love can change the speaker’s priorities. At the start, the word “tenacious” is a rule to be enforced. By the end, it is a quality the beloved has earned the right to use as she likes. Language, the poem suggests, belongs less to dictionaries than to the living, especially to those who have had to be tough in far more serious ways. In that sense, the steak is hardly the subject. The subject is the belated, tender recognition that being alive is more important than being right.