| The Cowherder's Daughter by Doug Martin The snow had won out over December’s freezing rain in the hillside town made of beef. The cowherder's daughter walked into the chilly-morning parlor, and for remedy handed him the bedpan. He had just recently had his hip replaced, and pissed in spurts while slumping forward, some of it running down his leg. Through the storm window, he saw Uncle Carl under the stuffbox fern, and a calf that he found out later was bleeding. Some of the previous, bone-black night, he had watched her buff the milky glass of an antique table, and drank. Unwelcome, the eggnog had sickened his stomach. He turned pale. Maybe the half-alive wasp that had wintered over in the attic and then seeped through the lightbulb hole in his room, buzzing to the brown-tiled floor, had passed on an illness. To comfort him, the cowherder's daughter had begun reading Indiana folklore stories about cows, one in particular where the heifer upset the witch’s potion onto a bedtable on which the splintered wood formed the face of Christ. Her voice rising in first person, the daughter had celibated the nun who in the story took the penis of an old mule inside her, comparing the friction between that and the usual head of salami. The nun was ill-bred, but of good looks when she died. The cowherder's daughter had stopped reading when he started vomiting into the tin bucket, tired with what seemed like the weight of snow upon him. He was a man who milked cows for a living, and he had shuddered at the thought of his daughter’s freeloading uncle selling the cows for slaughter to pocket their own money. She had shuddered, too, in her own way, in another room, at the age where she was just beginning to know money well. The cowherder's daughter had lifted off her skirt like one lifts the head of a pink-eyed cow in the pasture, and as she fell asleep dreamed of moving to New Zealand, of growing rich there by selling bovine colostrum to nuns. |
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© 2007 prickofthespindle.com |
Doug Martin’s work has appeared in Double Room, elimae, The New York Quarterly, Nimrod, Third Coast, and other publications. A former Theodore Morrison Scholar at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and a past poetry editor of the Mid-American Review, Martin’s books include A Survey of Walt Whitman’s Mimetic Prosody (Edwin Mellen, 2004) and Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years (editor), which is forthcoming in 2007. |