Nothing in the first four stanzas of "Squire" would look out of place in a cookbook. Skin is peeled, flesh is cut, filling is packed into a tin, and the oven does the rest. Then comes the final line, "i threw in some apple for flavor", and everything before it has to be reread. Apple is only the seasoning, which means the main filling was something else. The poem is a recipe for disposing of a body, told in the brisk, helpful voice of someone who is simply getting on with the baking.
The tag beneath the title, «pie | day 21 | freewrite», suggests an entry in a daily writing series with a one-word prompt, though the text alone can't tell us more. What it does show is a poet who took the word "pie" and found a dark door in it. The title is harder to place. A squire is a gentleman, a landowner, or a knight's attendant. The poem never explains the word, but one possible reading is that it names the victim, the only place he appears as a person before he becomes an ingredient. That is an inference, not something the poem confirms.
The poem's central trick is that its language works on two levels. Every action could belong to an apple: peeling, halving, quartering, dicing. Yet small word choices tilt toward something living. "Thin skin" is an old phrase for a touchy person. "Stripped skinless, raw, soft" is a stranger way to describe fruit than a body. "Knife slick" doesn't say what the blade is slick with, and "the air is sickly sweet" could mean baking or something worse. The poem never states anything outright, so the reader does the unsettling work.
The structure is as controlled as the cooking. There are five stanzas of five lines each, in free verse, with no rhyme and no end punctuation. Everything is lowercase, as if the poem can't be bothered with ceremony. The stanzas follow the order of a real recipe: peeling, cutting, dicing, assembling, baking. The cutting is oddly mathematical: "two, / then fourths, / then eighths," then "three, / then four." This counting sounds like method, like someone who has a system. Notice, too, that nobody is present in the poem until the very end. The actions are carried out by participles and implied commands ("peeled back," "tossed aside," "stripped"), so the work seems to happen on its own. Only in the last line does "i" appear, and it arrives casually, almost as an afterthought.
The word "revealing" appears twice, and the shift between the two uses is the poem's neatest move. In the first stanza, peeling is "revealing what's underneath", an act of exposure. In the fourth, the dough must "cover every corner / every revealing / edge of truth." The line break leaves "revealing" hanging alone for a beat before it settles into its new job of hiding. The pie crust becomes a cover-up. "Truth" is also the only abstract word in a poem otherwise made of knives, tins and dough, so it stands out, as if the speaker let slip what the cooking is really for.
The last stanza loosens the rhythm. The lines get longer and more conversational, and the tone relaxes, like someone who can finally stop concentrating. "Bake for an hour or so" is a cook's shrug. "Disposing the excess" is cold, bureaucratic phrasing, set in the same breezy register as the cooking time. Then "don't worry if the pie seems / a little bit strange" speaks directly to us, politely reassuring a dinner guest. The understatement does the horrifying work, and the reader has by now followed the instructions step by step and is almost an accomplice.
That is what makes the poem worth reading. It is short and was written, by its own label, as a quick exercise, but it shows how form and tone can contradict content to powerful effect. A recipe is one of the most comforting kinds of text there is, and the poem turns that comfort into a trap.