the whole cow 

in the smokehouse there's meat hanging
on the walls like paintings. red muscle
& tendon. on a drive through my home town
you can count crumbling piles of stone
where there used to be smokehouses.
where they used to fill the meat with 
grey & soot to keep fresh longer. now we have
refrigerators but there are small tiny fires
lit all over the house. i find a fire 
in the kitchen cabinet & i smudge it out
with my thumb. we have a chest freeze 
& mom talks about buying a whole cow's meat
to last the winter. it makes me uneasy
to consider that a whole animal's body 
might live in the frost of our machines.
yes not the eyes or the bones--but the meat
where all the movement happens. we might
awake one morning to find the animal 
re-assembling itself--a bleeding cow
un-thawing in the middle of the kitchen.
i try to consider the routines of 
the ghosts-- how they carry meat to
these crumbling stone sheds. wild grass
grows tall & bows all around. turns yellow
in the heat & the sun. there's one
in the woods by the creek that we used to think
was a tiny abandoned house. my neighbor, my brother
& me would crouch on the stone floor & 
etch our names in the faded soot. wipe hands clean
on our thighs. i want to be hung up 
in a smokehouse. i watch the clouds to 
crawl down my throat & into my muscle.
there are ghosts whose meat is heavy.
there is a cow alive now that might
live in our freezer all winter until
there is no meat of her's left. i want to
live in the freezer. i want them to see me
one piece at a time. a thigh. a rib.
a hand splayed out becoming a hoof. 
how thankful we should be for our methods
of preservation-- how the devices 
let us keep eating whole animals.
will they find our fridges in centuries
& want to crawl inside. i'm going out
to rebuild the smoke house. there are 
tiny fire under my fingernails. there is
a sense of slipping in my teeth.
there might be a fire under my tongue
where a boy left it. all smokehouses 
are of course women-- the only ones
who know what to do with dead things.
i want to live there-- where she can
tell me what to do with this flesh.
there is so much body. a cow weighs about
2,000 pounds. 2,000 pounds of edible.
i want to be that much feeding. here i am 
in the debris of a smokehouse once used
by a farmer who is now bones planted
in tall grass. there are many small graveyards
speckled across the hills. a stone fence.
headstone headstone headstone. all worn
clear of names. hunks of frozen meat
in the dirt. what we make of stone 
talks to the tall grass. what we make
of meat is eventually given 
to a tiny fire to erase the bleeding.