Cow Poetry

by M. Frost

A Dadaist poet printed words
onto the ribbed sides of cows.
He released them from their barn;
they scattered along the whims of pasture
layout, entropy, wind, and social rank—
he collected enough organic lines
to fill four books and a NY show.


I am no such artist, but
I once passed a Guernsey
with a perfect star on her face.

In a stall at the county fair,
I saw an enterprising Jersey,
the brown manure on her rump
dried into a precise map of America.

My favorite remains Number 1357, marked
in her left ear, a prime purebred Holstein.
She pushed out twin heifers, red and white.

Two months into her milking,
her stomach twisted like a Q.

I painted her with iodine,
sliced a thin red line down her flank
then notched a smaller hole below it,
repairing her stomach to a U.

She healed with a scar.
Everything she did that summer
bore an exclamation point.

This poem first appeared in Nimrod.