I don’t have the courage to describe it,
feeling that forms craters in my skin—

greasy craters, like body stamps
on sheets after tussling, grizzled like nations.

Eloquent and crooked, like the three hens raped by the rooster.
This is the pain of being alive.

This pain, the being alive,
I don’t have the courage to describe it.

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Camille Newsom is a livestock farmer in Western Michigan. Her first chapbook of poetry, This Suffering and Scrumptious World, was published in July 2023. In her poems she observes our living and dying world through humor, grief, and a sprinkling of spite.