"Bovines"
Just north of the Red River in Oklahoma

*SOUP SANDWICH

She shouted this is as fucked up as a soup sandwich

as we waited in the Indian Casino parking lot for the
interstate to open.  Up ahead a cattle truck on its side
with quite the scene of carnage.  Last night half the

bovines were killed on impact, the other half wandered  
for six befuddled miles.  I figured the state police
would put them out of their misery.  But they called
in the cowboys for an old-fashioned round-up.  It
reopened to a two-story pile of bloated Angus in the

median, some totaled-out mini-vans, and a police cruiser. 
I wondered what’s worse, getting run over by a mini-van
on the interstate.  Or dying in a west Texas feedlot,
the cow version of Andersonville, where driving through
Hereford, Texas when the wind blows just right is enough
to convert the most diehard beef eater into an eternal vegan. 

 
*forthcoming in SLANT: A Journal of Poetry