The Food Source Poem by James McLain

Beneath the barn where whispers nest,
A hatch is sealed, a secret pressed.
The soil is damp with something foul,
A stench that makes the coyotes howl.

The pigs don't squeal; they lick the floor—
Blood-slick boards behind that door.
Their eyes are glass, their bellies wide,
As if they've gorged on what we hide.

Ma serves stew with trembling grace,
Bits of gristle, a jawbone's trace.
"Eat up, child, " she softly says,
'God provides in stranger ways.'

The meat is sweet, yet screams inside,
As if a soul refused to die.
I found a tooth last winter's frost—
Too clean, too white, too human-lost.

Pa said 'We feed, or else we die, '
Then slit a drifter's throat bone-dry.
The pigs, they watched with gleaming eyes,
As if they knew which man would rise.

For something lives beneath the floor,
And every meal, it craves one more.
We are the hands that fill its plate—
The food source in its blessed fate.