by Devon Balwit
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| Martin Keep/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times |
Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model. —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 10, 2023
What we can’t bear to look at, we tolerate hidden:
the living penned with the dead, vivisection,
infants torn from their mothers. Already, I imagine
you, reader, lamenting this poem’s wanton
cruelty. Or protesting that you don’t eat red
meat or chicken flesh and so aren’t implicated .
Unfortunately, milk and cheese also equal
death. I wish it weren’t so, for I was partial
to Gouda—and eggs—but the free range birds
we imagine exist mostly in our heads. Farmyards
would span entire states were the hens to peck
at will. Back we retreat, then, into our dark
ages, some fated to suffer in a preordained hierarchy.
We’d squirm if this logic were applied to our species:
Women, brown people, the poor—What
can one do? They just happened to draw the short
straw. Surely, mere appetite can be retrained
once we admit animals know pleasure and pain.
Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023] she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick.