Every Monday morning,
he would appear wind-burnt
at our door, a dour man
with the toughened skin
of horned lizards
and the inscrutable face
of the praying
mantis,
would appear
as if the earth periodically
split and spit him out
to get certain jobs done.
What he had to sell
was not sold elsewhere.
The eggs –
not the blank
white plaster
eggs of the grocery store
but rather tea-
colored, elegant alien skulls
cool in my palms.
These charmed me.
But the milk?
I hated it.
How could something
so disturbingly textured be
“milk”?
Why would anyone
purposefully pierce the cream
placenta choking the neck
of the jug?
Why would anyone
intentionally take it inside
their mouth?
One afternoon,
after the farmer left,
my mother made a cake
for my birthday.
When she cracked an egg
on the plastic lip of the mixing
bowl, a half-formed miniature
something flopped into the batter
to be buried inside the whirr
of the blender’s blades.
“It’s time you know,”
she told me.
Reaching across the table,
she lifted a glass
of the farmer’s milk
to her mouth
and drank.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I spent most of my childhood exploring the Arkansas woods. Occasionally, I would burst into a sudden clearing as if into a snatch of dream: an abandoned pond full of dead fish and floating Styrofoam, the corpse of a horse next to a spurt of water jetting from the earth, a decaying country house full of stained mattresses and nothing else. Once, I broke through some bushes and stepped into a group of three naked teenagers wearing cowboy hats. They had been staring intently at the rotting hulk of a Pontiac Firebird in the creek before I interrupted them.