Five Hundred Acres and a Hundred Head
The machine of grace, the machine
of a heifer’s skeleton, intact; the giant vertebrae strung with tendon
like popcorn needled with thread. The machine of cows
going (always alone) to the water to die. Upstream
between two blackberry bushes, she is folded, picked-over: a map
of where she is broken and where she is not.
THRUSH Poetry Journal
November 2018