Milk
7 Milk It was a temple of the dark sublime with high-speed elevators that lifted us—O lyric lift—to the ninety-seventh level. Our cubicles resembled milking stalls in an agribusiness dairy where the farmhands—call them that, though their job descriptions Said Lactic Technicians—are what they always were. I remember the mauled one whose left arm, ripped off by a sorghum cutter, Was prone to beat his children while he was sleeping; and the woman whose face was eclipsed by a malignant shadow of birthmark— She saw small devils twisting the hydraulic valves of the giant chrome tank in the milk-room. The foreman was the normal one; He kept an eye on us all, but carried a pistol in the small of his back— For rats, he muttered with a sidelong maniac grin. Then there were the cattle: They queued up continually at the barn door mooing for us to service their animal needs: food in, milk out, and cycle away the shit, But they dreamed of liquid nitrogen, the tanks of sperm in a distant room, harvested from the bovine elite and stored like platinum: capital, You might say, flowing from its mystical font into the bloodline of nonstop traffic, newsstands, a Cartier’s branch on the corner, The far field of Times Square, sterilized now, the great political hosing well in the past, occluded by the digital billboard: Got Milk? ...
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