Madam or most likelier       Sir, surely by now                                 you have noticed the salt-       dark smell of sulfurflour, flower, sweat       that lifts from women’s           downturned limbs       after their close afternoons together.                          When I go milking       it seems my smell is everywhere                                   & if my letters to your co-       elder-judges survive,I like to think       my bloodbreathing scent       has been driven out          of their pages until       almond, cream, clean       grass alone remain,                       smooth & blank       as brochures.                               I tell myself I must be       a fresher midwest.       I must becleaner than any harvest,       a pasture swept of dust,          all my beasts housed       elsewhere. I tell myself       one must allow oneself                       to be kept, from time       to time one must accept being                                stripped down & stored.       Such is what the midwestwas unswamped for       so arms stippled pink with timothy &        the lustier mosquitoes       can prepare various proteins                for the use of those       better compensated. Future Honor,                            the fact is I need counsel:       how best to go oncorrectly, to go on     with correct living (to go on       with living), e.g.        the film in which       men lock an iron clamp into                   a cow’s butterfly haunches       & hoist her bodily                            from her rank bed of straw; thus       she rose more quicklyfor their morning chores.       A necessary pain.       Or the tumor         on my mother’s wrist       purpling, sharpening, until                      she smashed it with a dictionary     collapsed      from the blood-                               edge drumming into her      until she balancedback over the gravel       to return to barnwork.          When she settled into death       a penny-sized violet                      still swelled beyond       her yellow wrist.                                  Un-      faced, Un-      fazed:the body ungoverned requires strategy      just as mares overrunning          a snow-veiled electric fence      are wooed back into a warmer calm,                      & after, the wires      re-stitched, the current                                  re-switched     her herd held in place.Sometimes       I dream of the road thinning          into a distance hidden       beyond this farm & all along it                       snow, wire, current.       l await eagerly your response,                                    the response of your brothers,       in this hour ofbleach, the year       two thousand sixteen.