“Inseminator man,” he announced himself, extending a hand,

      though I can’t remember if we actually spoke.

      We needed him to make the cows dry off and come into new milk:

      we’d sell the boy-calves for veal, keep the females for milkers,

      and Festus would live on, with this man for a handmaid,

      whom I met as he was either going into the barn or coming out.

      I know for a fact he didn’t trumpet his presence,

      but came and went mysteriously

      like the dove that bore the sperm of God to earth.

      He wore a hard hat, introduced himself before I took him in,

      and I remember how he graciously ignored my breasts while still

      giving them wide berth.

      Maybe I wore a shirt or maybe not: to say anything

      about those days now sounds so strange.

      We would kill off the boys, save the females for milkers I figured

      as I led him to the halfway mucked-out stalls, where he

      unfurled a glove past his elbow

      like Ava Gardner in an old-movie nightclub scene.

      Then greased the glove with something from a rusted can

      before I left him in the privacy of barn light

      with the rows of cows and the work of their next generation

      while I went back outside to the shimmering and nearly

      blinding work of mine.

Tripe

      We were never a family given to tongue or brains.

      So the cow’s stomach had to bear her last straws,

      had to be my mother’s warning-bell that chops and roasts

      and the parched breasts of chickens, the ribs and legs

      and steaks and fish and even the calf’s sour liver

      had become testaments to the monotony of days.

      Since then I have understood the rebellion hedged

      in its bifurcated rind, its pallor, its refusal

      to tear or shred when chawed on by first

      the right then the left jaw’s teeth —

      until finally the wad must be swallowed whole.

      The tough meat meant life’s repertoire had shrunk

      to a sack inside of which she was boxing shadows —

      kids and laundry, yes, but every night the damned

      insistence of dinner. And wasn’t the stomach

      a master alchemist: grass and slops and the green dirt

      transformed into other cuts of bloody, marbled beef.

      Times when she wanted that same transformation

      the house filled with its stewing, a ghastly sweet

      that drove us underneath the beds. From there

      we braved mushroom clouds rising off her electric range,

      blowing the kitchen walls as wide as both Dakotas.

      And I pictured her pale-faced & lustrous with steam

      as she stood in that new open space, lifting

      the hair off her neck as the stockpot billowed

      its sugary haze like the sweat of a hired man.

At St. Placid’s

      She wears a habit the unlikely blue color

      of a swimming pool, the skin of her face

      smooth where it shows beneath a wimple

      from which one blond strand escapes.

      While she squints at the sun, her hands

      knit themselves in the folds of her skirts.

      The man she’s speaking to, the monk,

      is also young, his shoulders broad

      from shooting baskets in the gym.

      I have seen him running across the fields

      in his nylon shorts, big muscles like roasts

      sheathing the bones in his thighs.

      They are standing on the monastery’s walkway

      and I am at the window watching

      this moment when their voices fall away,

      nothing left but the sound of water dripping

      off the trees, a fuchsia brooding in a basket

      over her left shoulder. Silent now,

      they are thinking. But not

      about that. The fine weather, yes,

      the church bells, the cross, an old woman

      who used to come to Mass who’s dying.

      All this they think of. But surely

      not about that, no. Not that other thing.

The Roots of Pessimism in Model Rocketry, the Fallacy of Its Premise

      X-Ray had a see-thru payload chamber.

      The Flyer Saucer model was a gyp —

      unless you were the kind of kid who loved

      the balsa wood shredding more than flight time,

      the smashing down more than the going up.

      When Big Bertha sheared my brother’s pinkie

      I watched medicine make its promise good:

      in the future we would all be androids.

      The doctors reinstalled his milky nail

      and drained blue fingertip, though afterward

      I felt a little cheated. Already

      I’d envisioned how his mutant terrors

      could be put to my use, the naked stub

      unsheathed to jinx an enemy sneaker.

      We were a tribe of Josef Mengeles

      doing frontier science: putting crickets

      in the payload, betting if they’d return

      alive or dead. I always bet on death

      because they always came down dead. I was

      the pessimist, the child of many coins.

      When someone fished from the dusty ballfield

      the cocktail sausage of my brother’s loss,

      I gave its odds less than even money.

      My vote was: Put the finger in a can,

      send it to Estes Model Rocket Co.

      who would feel guilty enough to send cash.

      But guilt turned on me. Now my brother’s hand

      looks perfect, except when he makes a fist.

The Body Mutinies

      outside