fifty foot queenie

I’m going to see Doty read tomorrow at the Juniper Festival.  I went last year and cried when he read this poem because it is so simple and so strange and so foreign and sad.

Mother’s milk in my belly

and a little of her shit, too,

so that I might eat

of the sour-green steppes

that opened endlessly

before me, though not long

after I slid into sunlight

and the grass-world I slid

again into the mudhole,

and screamed, and screaming

sucked clay into my trunk

till I lay on the bottom,

my milk-tusks not even

sprouted, a sweet undercoat

of fat ready for my first winter,

and I am still one month old,

and forty thousand years without my mother.