With Annie Muse’s poem “Calves,” Bent Alaska is pleased to continue featuring the creative writing of LGBTQA Alaskans.

Calves

by Annie Muse

We had two sets of Grandparents.
In a time before the roads were turned into highways
There was Grandma and Grandpa on the High Road
And Grandma and Grandpa on the Long Road.
Grandpa on the Long Road was an upholsterer;
Grandma, Swedish and far more intelligent than any Norwegian,  hammered and crafted the most wonderous things, sewing and gardening and building things with her tiny tools.
Grandpa was Celtic and spit tacks and swung a magnetic hammer.
Their furniture was old even then, beautifully finished, overstuffed, an antique roadshow in a little house that didn’t even have a foundation.
Grandma’d lay awake all night dreaming her next big project.

Grandma and Grandpa on the High Road moved to a different house just around the
corner and up the road.
But half the year, in Cordova or Dutch, from Southeast to the Aleutians, Grandpa built the Canneries.
Grandma was a poet and before she died
Grandpa dug her swampy ponds she could watch from her kitchen window.
With dynamite.
She liked to watch the dancing girls at play amongst the lily pads.
Out at Grandpa on the High Road’s,
My place was on the backporch.
Three sides were walls of glass, and the fourth was a former exterior wall with white siding.
My view was over the chicken coop, out into beautiful fields, barb wired and electric fenced, a brook running through the verdance, all surrounding an enormous black hole that sucked in everything that got near it.
We’d raise cows until they were a year or two old
At which time we’d ring up Orion’s Meats, a butcher who did house calls.
The cows hightailed it when he drove up.
I’d run up into the woods after the cows,
Pick out the balled and dehorned Chosen One,
and chase him up the nave framed by two enormous Douglas Firs.
Armed and silent, Orion hid at the western altar.
Waiting. Waiting.
Every few weeks
Men in trucks brought little calves.
We had six locked and tiny stalls in a shed that could open out into the larger field.
They stayed inside, their gates locked to keep out the dogs and coyotes and older and larger, sometimes dangerously psychotic, fieldmates.
My own light and drafty sleeping porch
was just big enough for a small bed, a rusty chrome kitchen chair, some shovels and boots,
reeking of cigarettes and lactose milk replacement.
So between my long periods of staring off into space, smoking, I’d mix up phony milk,
And pour it into enormous baby bottles.
Then I’d walk it down and feed it to the calves.

For their first weeks all any calf knew was his tiny shitty stall.
One day, God would set him free.
I’d unlock the shed, walk inside, and opening a stall door, I’d climb over the rascal to get behind and shove him toward the unknown.
At first sometimes it was damn hard to get ’em to move
and they’d stand there
just inside the shadow,
blinking,
before shaking a back leg, then pronging into the sunlight, and for a few short minutes not even barb wire could contain them.

— Annie Muse

[February 18, 2012]

Photo credits: (1). Calves (holstein, friesian) on slatted floor in group pens, indoors. 4 February 2009. Photo © 2009 by Compassion in World Farming. Used in accordance with Creative Commons licensing. (2) Cows with calves in the Weaver Valley. A Public Right of Way extends across the fields near Brook and Hartley Farms. These cattle were photographed at 10:09 on 12th April, 2004. Photo © 2004 by David Crocker. Used in accordance with Creative Commons license.