PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The writer has been told that her eyes close together and her short ear lobes indicate several lives as a carnivore. Someone joked that she could only be killed with a silver bullet. She has been called

a 'void with teeth', has been told she will be reborn as a camel

because of her unfragrant breath. In her early twenties she had bought a mink collar. By speeding she had harmed a deer and killed a bird.

In a stupor, she watched her high school teacher point to a graph on the wall . a picture of a cow.. objectified, with dotted lines where the most expensive steaks are..(ads also portray women as pieces of meat) and did not connect meat to the cow. She was silent when the teacher pithed a frog in front of them, and later was

silent when she saw the caged primates at Ohio State. As a 12 year

   old she had obeyed the gardener and squashed

   a number of Japanese beetles. He thought that

   blooms were better than beetles. She watched Mondo Kane, a film of animal abuse around the world, and did not connect the slaughter to her own dinner table. She ate the thighs of chickens throughout her childhood, never connecting their shape to the leg. (She did meet someone in later years who had made the connection between the leg of the chicken and its life.. while slowed down on pot.) She ridiculed the man who told her that nonviolence politically was not consistent

with violence at the end of her fork. But his gentle words became sharp shards.. bursting the balloon of her dream world, waking her up from the unconscious sleep in which she inflicted suffering on the voiceless by eating their frozen, thawed, and cooked bodies. It was not until she asked her son not to fish and he replied.. that as long as she ate

meat she could not say anything... that she was able to make the change to vegetarian diet. Even then, 3 months later at Thanksgiving  time, she ate a bite of turkey rather than confront her mother in law whose disapproval she feared.



Most of those around her she thinks have stronger wills

than does she. So if she can do it anyone can. More timewater would flow under the bridge

before she would stop killing plants (only the

snake plant of all the plants left in her home was strong enough to survive her neglect). And 3 years

would pass before, fixing eggs for her family, she found her

skillet full of blood, beak, and claws from a baby bird partially formed in the fertilized egg, and forsook

stealing from their nests, the children of chickens.



34 years later, she just this year stopped buying

dry cat food containing trash fish... believing the

truth of Isaiah: the lion shall lie down with the lamb.

Her cats are eating corn, peas, beans, vegan burgers, soymilk

and vegan cheese. She

no longer has her hands on the ropes which suffocated

6 right whales (4 calves) this year.. ropes from

the longlines of commercial fish operations.

She has lost some teeth.. the 'mark of the cane'

from not having honored the sugar cane plant, not

having substituted totally the date sugar, fructose

and organic corn syrup provided by God.