My Cows

“Dependent Origination” by Aaron Lelito (originally appeared in 45th Parallel, Issue 5, Spring 2020)

My whole life I’ve given credit to the wrong people —
I like your balloons, I said to the man with balloons
tied around his belt loops to keep his pants afloat,
when I should have stuck my face in the dirt

and told the Earth I liked her helium.
My great-great grandpa liked the bootleggers —
the ones who wore cow hooves on their feet
when running their shine from distillery to table

so as to not catch the fifth-grade theatre production
spotlight eye of the law, when he should have liked
the cows, whose worst crime was burping so much
methane that the polar ice caps melt and unleash a long-

frozen malaria that shakes the Earth like an Etch-
a-Sketch, and even that part’s our fault. On road trips,
my friends and I have this game called My Cows
where every time you see a field of cows you shout

My Cows! and those are your cows, and we worry
about the numbers but never about how much sleep
they’re getting. When I sleep I tend to dream,
and sometimes I’m in a field with the cows from

the plains before Chicago, a pasture near Tacoma, my
runs when I lived in Georgia, and I jog from cow
to cow giving each a kiss on the nose like a very
polite bovine Halloween, and on some nights, I look up

and in front of me is a man, and he says Thank you,
and I say For what? and a crescent-moon scythe
slips out of his sleeve and he says For the cows,
and I’m afraid that I’ll be flayed to ribbons, that

my skeleton is a popsicle-stick birdhouse of wrong-
end wishbones, that the consequences of my actions
are three short consequences in the trenchcoat
of my actions, so when I wake up in a sweat-suit

I calm myself down by re-reading my bedside edition
of the First Law of Thermodynamics: teaching
myself that I don’t own this body, it’s just
something I’m renting for a while.

Nicholas Holt is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award and has a BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His work has appeared in The Kudzu Review and The Shore.