Talia Flores

CREAM CHEESE

I call my mother a cow
and she screams. I eat cream cheese
straight out of the container. I am seven
and I want to be a cow too
so I roll my tongue
in fur shoes. All my words
are stupid except
to the cows. All the cows
have clovered ears
and blanketed skin
and mix their moans with my dirty voice
in the wind.

TALIA FLORES is a recipient of the 2015 Texas Book Festival Fiction Prize and a winner in Stanford University’s 2017 Gabelle Prize for Writing in Poetry. Flores’s work appears or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Hobart, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. Flores is the managing editor for The Blueshift Journal, a fellow at Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, and a member of Stanford’s Spoken Word Collective.