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"Feedlot," a poem by Hannah Smith. On earth, we pack our food with more food. Forced eating and castration, a bunch of cattle compressed across such small acres, not enough room for them to graze or shit. What is a prayer, if not gas leaking past the troposphere, slowly, to the heavens? Methane burns holes in the ozone. I might as well thread this needle through my stomach, plump with fluid from a cyst swelled to rupture. Mine’s a body absorbing its own surplus. We could all use a good shower if we could just save enough water for some collective baptism. I’m not sure I’ve ever touched a cow, though my hands have known beef, breast, our basest parts: stuffed, clutched, bellowing low in the night. We mucked grass back into clay. I’m made of nothing except carbon. Now, our footprints muddle together in the corral with no sense of hoof and toe, no knowledge of god or whether we’ll make it through the gate before having our feet knocked out from under us.

Hannah Smith is a writer from Dallas, Texas. She received an MFA in Poetry from the Ohio State University, where she served as Managing Editor of The Journal. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Image, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 National Poetry Series Finalist, and her collaborative chapbook, Metal House of Cards, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.