Butter
I’ve never seen the land
of milk and honey, but once,
at the Iowa State Fair, I glimpsed
a cow fashioned of butter.
It lived behind a window
in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.
I filed past as one files
past a casket at a wake.
It was that sad: a butter cow
without a butter calf. Nearby I spied
a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-
sized, a mechanical afterthought
I thought the cow might have liked to ride.
You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.
But not if you’re a butter cow, not
if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if
not the land of milk and honey, the land
of milk, and dwelled within it.
It had a short life span, the butter cow.
Before it died, I looked
deep into its butter eyes. It saw
my butter soul. I could
have wept, or spread myself ,
for nobody, across dry toast.
To Whom It May Concern
for Harry Cobb
Soon I’ll move to Norway.
If that’s a bitter pill,
well, swill, swallow. I’m going,
and I won’t wallow, not in Norway,
where they’re so beyond
slave labor, with laws that say
a clerk must work within five
meters of a window through
which she can see a tree
and by that tree by seen.
My mind’s made up.
I will be Norwegian with Norwegian
trees. I’ll be seer and be seen.
It’s a scenic scene, it’s
how it goes, I’m going.
Tell the top brass, if
they ask, I don’t give
a damn about their asses.
But I will miss the beeches and the ashes.
It’s not their fault I’m leaving.
They’re only trees, and
leaving, I’m Norwegian.
Copyright Andrea Cohen 2011
ANDREA COHEN’s poems and stories have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review and elsewhere. Her poetry collections include The Cartographer’s Vacation, winner of the Owl Creek Poetry Prize, Long Division (Salmon, 2009), and Kentucky Derby. She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA. 
