A MEAT-PACKER'S SUPPLICATION

by Caprice Garvin

One African American worker at a Koch [meat processing] facility that had been targeted by Ice, spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity. He alleged that while Koch had recently begun taking workers’ temperatures before shifts, they had also withheld details of any workers who contracted the virus. He claimed the company was now handing out surgical masks, but had forced workers to use them over two or three shifts. “They ain’t offering nobody no disability, no unemployment, no time off,” the worker said. “I just keep my hands washed up, my face covered up, my whole body covered, and I pray to myself and hope I don’t catch it. The truth is there’s a chance that everybody in [here] will catch it.” —“‘We're modern slaves': How meat plant workers became the new frontline in Covid-19 war,” The Guardian, May 2, 2020

Never can I return to that unholy shape.
Hunched. Hands slipping beneath skin of lamb.
The corpse lies like wax in the ear.

Our hands are deep in the unhearing.
Fingers tread the crushed skull’s drowning place,
fingers sifting cartilage, organs snaking through.

We do not choose our own placement—tissue,
cells, molecules lain elbow to elbow on the conveyor belt.
The meat comes through our fingers.

These warehouse walls impersonate mountains.
They keep out the mountains and the voice calling down.
I would give my life for a vulture,

to see the arc of one tracing the arc of my eye,
to see that faintest movement at the edge.
To know there is something farther.

I know what it is to hear the last stream crackling ice.
A toe goes in. A knee.
A tongue soaked numb.

I am flexible as the neck of the vulture bending down.
I pick apart this body so that my son may know
his own body whole.

The skinned eyelids watch the blood drain
from floors as clean as obedience.
I will not feed my son my suicide.

Caprice Garvin, a native New Mexican, currently resides in New Jersey. She studied in the Writing Division at Columbia University, where she was awarded The Woolrich Award for Excellence in Writing, and in the Writing Division at Sarah Lawrence College where she earned an M.F.A. in fiction. Most recently her work appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry. 

CIRCE'S BLESSING

by Ralph Culver

#Werepig Doodle by Ariane Hofmaniyar.

—for Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill

Cruelty, greed, indifference to others—
these were men, abject one minute
in their pursuit of power, and
obsequious the next
in their fawning adoration
for those who achieved it, often at
their own expense, and worse if
their lives had been spared in the quest.
These were men; this is what men do.
And when she turned to them

and changed them, into swine, jackals,
any form that crept or flew
or crawled but could not speak
with a man’s corrupted tongue,
they had settled into the new shapes
she had given them and,
more often than not, they were thankful.
In fact, for the most part, they
did not want to go back to being men.
It was safe to say they had seen enough.

Here’s the deal: it’s not an intervention
if it’s what you’ve been begging for.
Like most women, whether the woman
knows it or not, whether or not
she wants to know, she understood them
better than they understood themselves.
She was doing them a favor. Such relief
to be the condor, the vulture, that covets
carrion and seeks it out, but calling
to his own, and sharing the spoils.

Ralph Culver's most recent collection of poems is So Be It (WolfGang Press, 2018). His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. He is a past grantee in poetry of the Vermont Arts Council and multiple nominee for the Pushcart Prize. His book A Passible Man is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2020.

BIG WINDS

by Neil Shepard

by grobles63

Johnson, Vermont

Big winds in the back pasture this morning.
Must have blown in from that dark bluster
in Ohio where the orange-haired dystopian
shouted himself red: a nation broken,
and only himself with enough narcissistic
moxie to fix it. What would be the fix? Short,
as always, on specifics. But the fix, so
far, fixates on anyone who crosses him.
In short, big winds blow from the little mind
of a schoolyard bully, a bull who charges
every flagging patch of red. And half
the nation’s ready to blow in his blowhard
direction. They’re small children who want
a power-daddy to fix what’s broke.
And the big winds in the back pasture
presage afternoon thunderstorms and
a dome of hot air crushing down on us
that feels like the beginning of intolerable
conditions. A whole summer and autumn
of unbearable heat, which will roast the air
to record highs. If there’s a weather god
today, he’s a strongman. All those grass-heads
below are dried-out, hollow, blown in one
direction: his. The one turkey wading
through them is the steadiest creature in the field,
flattening the unthinking reeds, feeding as it needs,
and popping out onto lawn, finally, like a reality
TV star to shake off its crown of fluff and seed,
and now I see he’s no turkey, he’s a red-faced turkey
vulture, perfect for the clean-up work to come.

Neil Shepard’s sixth and seventh books of poetry came out in 2015: Hominid Up (Salmon Poetry, Ireland) and Vermont Exit Ramps II (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear in many places, among them Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Poem-a-Day (Academy of American Poets), as well as in Harvard Review, New England Review, Paris Review, and Southern Review. Shepard taught for many years at Johnson State College in Vermont and edited for a quarter-century the Green Mountains Review.