The children load me into the trailer. Padlock the tailgate. Take the dirt road past the sanitation plant, the tannery, the strip club, the gun store. I’ve known nowhere but the farm, the pen, the milk bottles & dust & feed. The children laugh in the cab, turn their muffled music up. I put my arms through the grates. Feel dry wind. Feel chaff & silt kicked up by the tires. Ahead, an infinite fence, a far complex. The October fields swallow us, bristle-mouthed with the wrecklings of cornstalk & soy. I see my friends already in line at the factory, being led through a labyrinth of fences into buildings by men with glowing sticks. The children unload me to line, laugh when I’m prodded, at the glitch of muscle & memory when the shock sticks glitch my skin. Men in PPE load the trailer with pallets of frozen meat. They & the children shake hands & the children drive off & the dust from their tracks rises up to murk out the sun. The men jab me toward the line, toward the funneling fence. I hear the confused lowing of my friends being led to doorway through a tunnel of aberrant angles. They cannot see each other. They cannot see what’s ahead. In their panic, they cannot listen. I hear the faint-dull puff of the bolt gun at the temples of my friends already inside. I hear them collapse, the skid & slip of their hooves on the blood drain, the whir of the tangling machine lifting them to be slit. I try to warn them, everyone, but my voice, like theirs, is now a hoarse bellow. My tongue swelling in my mouth. I am nearing the doorway. I am nearing the doorway. Strips of scuffed plastic hang between the boltgun & me. A vinyl veil smeared with muzzle-snot & fear-drool. A gray cloud snags in the sky above us & dims the oppressive sun, the warlike heat. The men pause, all of them, & look up. I smell their eyes catch in the light like living motes. This is the moment I needed. As ballast. As rebar. To decompose who has power & who has none. This is the moment before my deregulation when I am no longer scared of the moment’s coming. I am not a pioneer. I am just scared to my animal blood of the labyrinth, of the doorway, of what the men will keep of me & what they will grist. I take my first step back & cannot untake it. I gore my way through the men, feel their stomachs give way to my horns, their limbs torn with my hands, their heads beneath my hooves. The chainlink & razorwire & cladding tear away like tissue. My friends bray, buck, bewildered. No labyrinth left. No language. I roar & rage & run. I gallop toward nothing, nowhere, anything, anywhere. The road grinding my hooves, adding me quietly to the dust by the teaspoon.
