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Writer's pictureThe Red Wheelbarrow Poetry

A New Veterinarian Spends a Compulsory Year Working at a Slaughterhouse

Melissa Sussens


I have watched death.

Have become so familiar with slaughter

in the last 204 days that I will see it


with my eyes closed, even two years later --

My white gumboots splattered red,

the bare white walls and steel frames


echoing with the growl of saw

splitting sternum. The dull thud of another hide

tossed down a chute to somewhere other


than here. The cold death banging into me as I fight

my way through the crush of carcasses

to reach the chiller’s exit sign.


To survive, I separated myself

from the living, raced home

to scrub myself clean. No soap could chew


through the smell of sulphur of 800 sheep packed

tight as coffins in a mass grave.

I haunted the compulsory hours,


a silent witness to each ending,

there but not there.

I did not speak against


the prodders or the whips.

I did not remove the calf

left to watch its mother stunned.


I did not call out after the truck

overloaded into a trample of death.

Life was eviscerated and quartered,


every day. The person I thought I was, bled out.

No longer can I hold myself holy --

I am fifteen again, at boarding school, watching


two girls clamp the pillow over another’s head.

It takes five minutes until unconsciousness.

For two, I did nothing.


Just stood there, complicit.


Featured on 14 October 2021

First published in New Contrast issue 193 as 2nd prize winner in the New Contrast National Poetry Prize


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