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| NO USE by Meryl DePasquale
… if Rachel were ever to think, feel, laugh, or express herself, instead of
dropping milk from a height as though to see what kind of drops it made,
she might be interesting though never exactly pretty.
—Virginia Woolf The Voyage Out Consider Holstein mothers mammary glands and baleful mooing. Newborn calves will suck your hand: her dugs gone missing. And this girl has the sort of face that’s been sucked through a straw. She often sits opaque inside packaging, like liquid bone. Consider carton folds or blue-tint plastic slick with some bold color, bovine smile, photos of Europas gone missing. A tumble of black-and-white markings. She might swim a fluid breast stroke but that won’t help with hoof-avoidance, how to dive off a spine. It’s a skill to watch white hit tile with dry eyes. Consider how she sours under the fridge, seeps into a crevice never cleaned. We want her for the skeleton. We wean and rob, dress her in our own losses, but she seldom splashes back. A spill demonstrates what any bareback rider knows. Strong bones, like drops, still break before a bully.
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