Susan Carlson

Move Along Now, Move Along

I was twelve when we moved to the dairy farm.  I saw it for the first
time 
from my father’s chartreuse pickup truck as he pulled down the dirt
drive, 
my bare mattress roped onto its bed, weighting down everything
piled up below.

On the second day I stumbled backward into an electric fence
trying not to see where store-bought milk came from – hooves 
wearing the ground into grass-blackened grooves marking all that
weight

circling by.  I was held in place by the currents coursing through my
neck,  
shocked by what I thought was a bull crushing the back of my head 
between cruel jaws.  I pulled free, but couldn’t find the muscular man-cow 

of my mind, just a crooked wire rigged between bent and aging
posts,  
penning two hundred lady-livestock moving slow, gaze-down, 
all those milk sacks swaying heavy above the ground-down ground. 

They’re not pretty, those dairy-dames, those milk-maids; 
men mean nothing nice when they call a woman a cow, nor the
middle
school ones – boys mooing at heifers in the halls.  I was twelve 

when I began to understand what it means to have something to
carry,
to lumber or swing.  There was nothing to nourish me then, no
possibility of power lurking beneath the matted coats on the bovine

broads lined up and attached to mechanical milking machines
with metal teat cups and thick plastic vacuum tubes boasting 
the rapid and efficient removal of milk.  So many flies.  I was twelve 

when I began to bleed, when my ungainly girl body gained its
irregular 
reminder of each month, of what it means become one who makes
milk, a
lady—
beast who best beware how thin the wire that pens what fails to move
away.