So we were watching
a documentary on cows standing
not in fields of green grass
like we saw Upstate, but
on cement, squeezed in together
with black surfaces from their
droppings that get washed up
into lagoons and run off
into waterways, and how
they still moo, but mostly
how they only get to eat
corn, though I’m sure
they recall in their DNA
memory the way a blade
of grass felt in their mouths,
how the breeze cooled
them by the creek rippling
beneath an old weeping willow
and how they hope to rub up
against a tree to scratch
their hind quarters or be able
to switch their tails
to tag a fly
Teresa Mendez-Quigley, a Philly native, was selected Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Ellen Bryant Voigt in 2004. Her poems have appeared in four volumes of the Mad Poets Review, Drexel Online Journal, Philadelphia Poets, and many more.