Poem by Rob Winters

​My Herd
 
“Consumers are expected to eat 222.2 pounds of red meat and poultry this year (2018).”
  -- USDA
 
“A steer weighing 1,000 pounds will average around 430 pounds of retail cuts.”
  -- OK Dept of Agriculture
 
Since I was eighteen, or so,
responsible for feeding myself,
I have eaten twenty cows.
 
That’s based on averages.
Being honest with myself,
I have probably eaten twenty-one.
 
Now that it’s been said aloud,
I feel that the onus is on me
to account for them.
 
I drink about a gallon of clean water per day
and shower in perhaps nineteen more
but my cows drink two hundred.
 
Mea culpa.
 
We eat together, too.
I eat the cows, while they eat
five hundred pounds of forage a day.
 
Sorry; that sounds like a lot.
 
Clearly, I will need a pickup truck
to carry all that feed,
and some fairly large shovels.
 
Apologies to my neighbors.
 
 
Also, I have to name all twenty-one
and keep a waiting list of cow names,
one every other year,
 
to expand the herd.

Rob Winters (Prince George’s County, MD) is a computer engineer at NASA who writes enough poetry to have something to read at local poetry events. His poems have appeared in 21: Blackjack Poetry Journal, District Lines, and Gargoyle. He lives with a poet, two cats, and a bird in Bowie, Maryland. 

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