On the Line

In the abattoir the white clad women shuffle the assembly, hock, head. The parts greater than the sum. Thus disassembled the thing is a thing, chilly, flaccid, on to be packet, flesh bulging its plastic coat, bleeding on its little bed. They are as women at the harvest, as women at the well, women along the Ganges with their damp robes and dead. Women with these awful babies hanging at the breast. Empresses of flies. Snooded practitioners of sorting, they know snout and asshole, as women know the orifices where strange things go in, come out. The wrinkles in the ghost gloves on their hands tell fortunes. Life lines, jagged hearts. Creased lines. Crosshatched. Under gloves veins the color of storm. Age spots as flocks of sparrows. Lines of strike. Loss lines. Catastrophes the color of winter dirt. Their skin in the chill dimples as chicken skin. The lace of their bras going gray in the dim water. Under fluorescent they can see exactly what they're doing. They cannot stop. It's a game. A simulation of striving. Ding ding ding says the machinery. At the end of every shift, in spite of everything, they are hungry. Daughter, you find yourself in the middle of your life. In the middle of a white room. Breath of dirt. Breathe of dirt. Archaea. Protist. Virus. Death comes of a flat land, hills as bulge, carbuncle. Roads are where dust goes to die. The women wake thirsty. The women's socks, sweet things, are a stay, holding them to Earth by their dusty ankles. Slight slope of the floor to the drains. The drains to the sewer. The sewer to the plant to the dump and to the rivers to the glass, a plastic one by the sink to clink against the teeth in the mid-night. From the spreading of the floods o'er the fields. Sluicing the roads and riding the teeth of trucks of bodies, the hobbled multitudes of their dreams. The women wake frantic for more children to eat all this death, to thrust the pigskin past some white line that makes the living worthwhile. And even if they don't. Want that. Well. The women shuffle in humming silence in their white robes, their white booties, like angels dancing to a dull roar. The heart land. And after the floods come the locusts that strip the crops that feed the pigs that feed the nation. And the strange angels remove their ghost suits and hitch up their pants and go to tend the tender and the hardened, shoveling the suspect dirt over a coffin with that dreadful scrape and thump, dirt over the mahogany, shiny in the rain the seeded clouds send down.

MENAGERIE

Rabbit weaves whispers about itself on simple slippers, felted angora shrunk and toe-sewn. Shuffles around on slippery floors saying sh, sh, and everyone sleeps after Sunday roast chicken but for one restless eye, lashed.

Moves largely at night, itself a shadow of itself. Furred and reaching, Fisher swarms up the white pine. Goes out on a limb. It leaves always in the early morning before I am awake. Someone drives it to the docks with its duffel. When cornered it is unpleasant. I should know. A member of the weasel family, as am I, eating other small animals, such as myself. Wind in the fur beckons. What kind of weasel doesn't love the sea?

Oh, Narwhal, no wonder you wander far north in long winters. With an appendage like that no one listens to what you're saying, too distracted by your point point point.

The Black Bear's favorite swear word is goddamnit. It's good to bellow at the divine, as one more silvered fish slithers through your claws. The river's, goddamnit, incessant clamor.

Does little deliberate. Goofy-eyed and fannish, Fish's pretty much an idiot, startled by shifting shapes as leaves shadow sun. It lives inadvertently by its constant shiver. Given the set of its eyes, it can't look back.It's not so great at looking forward either. Which is good, because it's scared enough as it is.

I am an egg gone overboard, a soft-shell, crabby, crying over spilled albumen, born wet and too soon. But my Magpie eye is caught by the shiny things. In such focus I survive. Diamonds everywhere.

The Vixen is withered, red weathered, mud-clumped, and tumbled by kits she cuddles and nips, who leap for her teats in the dark den until the unleashed beagle raises holy hell. Then what's a woman to do? She has some teeth. She knows how to use them.

Cicada killer is what she's called, a long moniker for a short kid, but she packs a punch, all tight wound and triggered, though she flies with fairy wasp wings, and steals at night into the ground, hole in the dirt, some vampire coffin. I haven't seen cicadas in years. But, boy, the girl is angry all the time.

Always searching, one Robin ear eyeing the ground, an eye to ear the sky, looking and looking, even when I'm not really hungry, or not really hungry for what I hunger for. Or am. Jerk and fluff. Twitch and flick. For me, there's always the gone worm quietly calling.

The Worm itself was maybe lost. You push blind through muck. You might rage too and perhaps drink a tad too much. A worm despairs just like the next guy. But he can't throw up his hands. Think about that.

Marilyn McCabe’s collections of poems include Being Many Seeds, Glass Factory, Perpetual Motion and Rugged Means of Grace. Videopoems have appeared in festivals/galleries. She talks about writing at Owrite:marilynonaroll.wordpress.com and the podcast Whirled Through a Poem’s Eye.