NVN Monday: DESPITE MANY EDITS, THIS POEM REMAINS A SCREED
by Devon Balwit
Martin Keep/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images via The New York Times
*
Individualized animal abuse is a crime; systematic animal abuse is a business model. —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, June 10, 2023
*
What we can’t bear to look at, we tolerate hidden: the living penned with the dead, vivisection, infants torn from their mothers. Already, I imagine you, reader, lamenting this poem’s wanton cruelty. Or protesting that you don’t eat red meat or chicken flesh and so aren’t implicated . Unfortunately, milk and cheese also equal death. I wish it weren’t so, for I was partial to Gouda—and eggs—but the free range birds we imagine exist mostly in our heads. Farmyards would span entire states were the hens to peck at will. Back we retreat, then, into our dark ages, some fated to suffer in a preordained hierarchy. We’d squirm if this logic were applied to our species: Women, brown people, the poor—What can one do? They just happened to draw the short straw. Surely, mere appetite can be retrained once we admit animals know pleasure and pain.
*
Devon Balwit walks in all weather. In her most recent collection Spirit Spout [Nixes Mate Books, 2023] she romps through Melville’s Moby Dick.