Todd Heldt
Cattle Prod
It’s so bad even the cows are mad.
That was the joke in the nineties
because people love to be scared,
and drunk drivers and Satanists
were passing into passé. I am
sitting in the American-Chinese place
eating happy spicy beef because
the thought of my cheese being swissed
in a decade bothers me less
than being hungry for my three o’clock meeting.
I’m remembering the eighties,
how I’d climb out the window
sometime around midnight,
and wait for Brad to pick me up.
We’d drive out to the farm roads,
pop open a twelve-pack of whatever
we could pay our bum to get us,
and I’d think about the day when I
could write my own rules, do whatever I wanted.
I glance back and forth between
my meal and the clock on the wall.
It tastes okay in the way
that everything tastes like something it isn’t,
and I have this meeting I don’t
want to go to. My coworkers expect
me to say something smart, but I can’t
even tell for sure what I’m eating
or if it will kill me some day.
I try to pick it apart in my mouth,
read the chemicals like Braille on my tongue,
but it feels like everything else.
Rumor was that the devil worshipers all
hung out and sacrificed cats
deep in the fields after midnight.
They tortured them with icepicks
and lawnmowers, but we
found neither dead cats nor bad people.
We drove and drank and every few minutes
one of us would say something wise.
Brad was lame in that he never knew
any parties to go to or girls who would date me,
and no one liked him, either. I would swig
what was left and swim in my thoughts.
Around 4AM we’d drive back home,
kill the engine and lights and he’d coast
down the hill to my house. I’d climb
in my window just before my father’s alarm,
I’d sleep three hours and go to school hungover.
Just like that the cows were taken
to court, and everyone stopped talking about
spongiform encephalitis, as if
some person who was rich as a king
had decided it wasn’t important,
and we must have figured by then
that poison food was no longer
the kind of battle we could win.
It was 2000-something by then, and there
were new wars for new abstractions,
and condos to buy while we still had time,
because real estate had never lost value.
It was about 3:45 when we tried to call it
a night. A fog had rolled in from the fields,
and we were almost out of beer.
My dad would be waking soon, so we
one-eightied the car, and were stopped,
vulnerable among the crickets
and whatever the night might conceal,
our headlights only defining
the prison we thought we were in.
On the next curve a cow darted out of the grey,
almost like it was spooked, and I wondered
as the car slammed it down to the ground
if I’d ever seen a cow run before.
It got up and dragged itself back
into the night. But our front end
was so wrecked we couldn’t drive,
and all there was to do was hurl
the empties out in the fields, hope all
those stories were lies, and sober up
before a cop came along to take us back
home to the disappointment we were used to.
I bought a condo in 2006, because
I still lack the bones to not go along
with whatever stampede they devise.
The lights were shut off, the gas will be next,
and bankruptcy will be all my fault.
My meeting starts in five minutes.
I’m three blocks away, and it has been
four decades of the same kind of grind,
the same fear, the same gimmick:
you can beat me and beat me, and I can’t
do a thing. No matter how I try
to wriggle free, trick my dad, sneak out
the back, cover my tracks, or pretend
the devil isn’t lying in ambush for me,
there’s nothing I can do: the fog rolls in,
the Satanists gather, the lawyers knock,
and even the food is trying to kill me.
I wish there were some sort of lesson
I had learned from the never winning,
the cavalcade of screwups, but all
I can tell you for sure is when
a cow has got your name on it
there is nowhere you can hide.
Todd Heldt is the author of Card Tricks for the Starving (Ghost Road Press, 2009). His work has appeared in 2AM Muse, Blast Furnace, Chiron Review, The Ekphrastic Review, The Fear of Monkeys, Gyroscope Review, Modern Poetry Quarterly, and many other journals. Heldt is a librarian in Chicago.
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