☀ Today's Poem: "On a Farm Near Junction City" Nate Duke

Beside the rainy hog shed, the county food bank
forklifts pallets of old bread, blue with deep mold
and tints of February. In our slickers with knives
we slit packages of rancid buns, pre-made PB & J's,
their special rot an Oregon green—and feed it all
to the pigs. We feed them fetid eggs, decayed
chickens also, but today is bread day. Farm folk
say pig manure is the only kind with a bad smell;
it's the ammonia. We clean the pen with shovels,
push the slimy dreck to the slough. My colleague
and I, we scrape the floor till our filthy tools spark.
This guy's a real employee, speaks good Spanish
to the other hands; so, when he asks, are you a man
of the herb? I think I must be—a dim volunteer
shoveling his way to dinner. All this because
I should've followed some lover to Chattanooga
or learned to operate the track hoes in Arkansas
but instead I'm near the ocean, and broiled thoughts
cool in labor's mute thrum. After a shower, I'll listen
on the couch to the farm's daughter play Chopin
while a cat I've never met scales my chest, nestles
into sleep. A kind of recompense I think, for lives
we didn't choose—because winter's animal bed
needed fresh straw, or the woodstove in our bunkhouse
grew cold, and somebody had to get up and stoke it.