VII.

I am an astoundingly beautiful cow and I know my fate

it’s a prey thing anticipating slaughter

bring out my missing sons my spoiled daughters

regardless of your romantic rural virtues

in husbandry and abundance it is nevertheless as you suspect

I know all about your mistakes and am judging you

behind my placid bimbo gaze I calculate

the leached nitrates the cargo of conflict phosphates

the torturous farrowing crates the ever inventive

cruelties of efficiency but there are new ways

or more so old oh baby look me in the eye

when you’re killing me make it personal

do not do me the disrespect of doubt

do not take a single one of us for granted

show me to the promised rotational grazing

reveal your plenteous riparian plantings

fence off your wetlands

cherish your eels and eschew intensity

because the soil still lives

and it loves on you bounteously

even in your smoky metallic cages you know it

isn’t just economic some abstract wealth-generating asset

but teacher shelter maker mother just like me

your walking temple to the womb

and all your modern systems of governance

kneel to this iconic fertility goddess

bouncing my ample natural capital up the country lane

so bitches you’d better marvel

you’d better eat drink and be merry

do not just cruise past in that decrepit Subaru Legacy

you feast from these paddocks already

even if you have never set foot in them

you drink the milk chlorophyll charmed in my rumen

although you have not yet solved your problem of meat

you are something like me I think in kinship

you upright wolves you wet-eyed feeling fiends

sisters sisters sisters sisters

your tiny hearts swelling like bladders

take your place in the herd of dying things

let us jump all the fences and piss in the rivers

yes you already eat of these fields

now get down on all fours and graze