Click the arrow on the audio player to hear  T.R. Hummer read this poem. You can also download the recording or subscribe to Slate's Poetry Podcast on iTunes.
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It was a temple of the dark sublime with high-speed elevators
………that lifted us—O lyric lift—to the97^thlevel.
Our cubicles resembled milking stalls in an agribusiness dairy
………where the farmhands—call them that, though their job descriptions
Said Lactic Technicians—are what they always were. I remember
………the mauled one whose left arm, ripped off by a sorghum cutter, 
Used to beat his children while he was sleeping; and the woman
………whose face was eclipsed by a malignant shadow of birthmark—
She saw small metallic devils twisting the hydraulic valves of the giant
………chrome tank in the milk room. The foreman was the normal one;
He kept an eye on us all but carried a pistol in the small of his back—
………For rats, he muttered with a sidelong maniac grin. Then there were the cattle:
They queued up continually at the barn door mooing for us to service
………their animal needs: food in, milk out, and cycle away the shit,
But they dreamed of liquid nitrogen, the tanks of sperm in a distant room,
………harvested from the bovine elite and stored like platinum: capital,
You might say, flowing from its mystical font into the bloodline
………of nonstop traffic, newsstands, a Cartier's branch on the corner,
The far field of Times Square, sterilized, the great political hosing
………now in the past, occluded by the digital billboard: Got Milk?

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