Michael Dooley

We pulled the roof off of the milking parlour,
sheet by sheet, drew square cut nails like teeth —

thunder-snap and peeling crack on concrete,
bouncing big-eyed kittens from their bales.

It opened like a wound, the pit, though we’d picked,
when we should have not, its hardened line of steel.

Rafters steamed by wet-day cows, introduced again to light.
In their hue, the strange and awful tone of opened bone.

Cows cautioned their step into this roofless place,
saw strangeness of stars when Dad milked at dawn,

hungered and herded dog-less to the yard,
greedy for the winter silage opened in June.

So we watered fields, tore up river like a weed,
the vacuum tank a dung-chen prayer

for hedgehogs found curled into knots in the dust,
swallow chicks who stepped out into oblivion.

Prayers, too, in the milking quiet between us:
stories of men, of fodder and strain,

how the heat was walking them into parlours,
giving them answers to questions they’d never need again.