I feel a slow lightning        Lord
and I feel your long shaft
is set to drill deeper

Somehow I thought
this silence could be
the immense weapon
of your love

and how that is different

but the silence is concussive

you glassing the fields
you plucking the lights
from the animals
                                                                      “Dress—”

you        the memory
of an illusion
that made me walk
a little funny

*

              Said carcass

              said head pulling means being offset from the vertical plane beneath

              said carcass suspension system; hook means adapted to engage the jaw of

              said carcass and

              said hook means adapted to engage

              said head pulling means, whereby

              said carcass assumes a “bellydown” attitude,

              said head is rotated to the snout up position, and

              said head is substantially removed from

              said carcass

*

What else. I’ve beaten sound. hook it into its bunghole. the hipbone. the bunghole.
near the front. cheek and drag.
                                                                                                    He took a sip of black coffee.

                  They’ve been shocked.
                  They’re of each other.

*

A silence came over me so I was thinking about silence.

Thoughts were there but they didn’t fit to song.
Like an enfilade                                      &nnbsp;    the silence kept coming
all over and along the length of my mouth             and my
thoughts:

it started to feel like a deficiency
not to be able to write what I was thinking about,
write it faithfully, whatever
that means—not write rants—which was how
the thoughts weren’t fitting to song,
why fit was even what was important: Former
factory farm worker:
                                         we pack pigs in so tight,
                                         guts pop out their butts—
                                         a little softball of guts
                                         actually comes out.

(knocker   shackler   sticker   legger   skinner   header   neck-breaker   hide-splitter
                               meat in this country       it’s almost lyrical by itself— )

[shackler]
                              “stick ‘em and drop ‘em, stick ‘em and drop ‘em—
they don’t get shocked right they rushing so fast,
not sticking them right then dropping them in the tanks alive
that happens a lot, we take iron pipes on baby calves
cause their skull is still soft, one time the knocking gun was broke,
they were taking a knife and cutting the back of the cow’s neck
                                                                         open
standing up, they just fall down and be ashaking
I’ve drug cows till their bones start breaking,
                                  the cow be crying with its tongue stuck out”

[sticker]

“You don’t just kill it, you go in hard, push hard, blow the windpipe, make it drown in its

own blood. Split its nose. A live hog would be running around the pit. It would just be

looking up at me and I’d be sticking, and I would just take my knife and—

cut its eye out while it was just sitting there. And this hog would just scream. One time I

took my knife—it’s sharp enough—and I sliced off the end of the hog’s

nose, just like a piece of bologna. The hog went crazy for a few seconds. Then it just sat

there looking kind of stupid. So I took a handful of salt brine and ground it

into his nose. Now that hog really went nuts, pushing its nose all over the place. I still had

a bunch of salt left on my hand—I was wearing a rubber glove—and I

stuck the salt right up the hog’s ass. The poor hog didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

[Jarvis]

JARVIS HOG BUNG SYSTEM MODEL V-C for cutting out of hog bungs
quickly and efficiently cuts out hog bungs fast a single operator can bung
up to 1200 hogs per hour easy to use skilled labor not required lightweight
maneuverable for maximum productivity Increased yields optimal blade
size leaves more meat less casing damage than with a knife
Hardened and ground solid stainless steel blades for long life

*

A cold plow scallops the snow field the road has become

so it comes to look like the only road
and a long white scar

your spine like a scaffold for sunning cotton

Two signs:
Moose Crossing, Blind Person.
                                                                                   Icicles ripen
from both.

Diamond dust on distant hills
(plate crystals shifting
                                               subzero air) smarts;
                                                                                          language too
busy taking the parts apart

When my sister calls to say she has two hearts; the one
“the size of a poppy seed”;            (the other one

will now not break—(three years to make that egg
twenty thousand dollars and seven specialists))

I think (but don’t say)               I paid five bucks
for one of those lab-grown sea monkey kits,
which I never did open.

3 a.m:

still thinking about sea monkeys.
Look them up.
A breed of brine shrimp
classified “new species”               artemia x nyos
(New York Ocean Science labs),

trademark Transience Incorporated.

Add to water one “Instant Life” eggs
package. Eggs
package: eggs,
yeast, salt, borax, light soda ash.
                                                                                   This in absence
of a formal description
from the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature

                                    Our calico cat        I remember this        secreting kittens
                                    in the red shredded mulch beneath a boxwood hedge
                                    I told my sister babies were made by letting a man pee on your privates
                                    what I thought I’d been told      not me she said     never
                                    me neither        the cat was crying         we stroked her head
                                    picked strips of mulch off the soaked kittens

                                    they were looking around with their eyes stuck shut
                                    iridescent in patches where sun came through branches

*

I had made this note
and gone no further:

“read the headline
MISS DEAF TEXAS
KILLED BY TRAIN
WHILE TEXT
-MESSAGING PARENTS

and felt only thrill
at music of it”

similarly

the spam message
subject header         HORNY!
18 Yr old FORCED
to AnaL!!   hORsE
ACTION!!

in my

inbox

early this morning

*

Comb me from others        no
speak to people where they are.

Winter acts on itself

Caw of ice
at the window

Claws called frost roses
scrolling the glass
                                           How close
is the argument from
desire?

A child remembers herself

who had found a deer skeleton
in the forest
and took home the jawbone
a kind of turning
it was filthy and full of teeth

but she scrubbed it with bleach
and sat in the sun with it         calling it

Dear One
and
White Mouth—

a kind of learning from silence
I guess

or at least about it
when nothing comes.

 


Dialogue in part of this poem incorporates text from worker accounts documented in Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the U.S. Meat Industry (Prometheus Books, 2006) by investigative reporter and author Gail Eisnitz; with her generous permission.