The Meat Paradox: Why People can Love Animals—and Eat Them

I wouldn’t want his hands in my mouth, that dentist 
from Minnesota grinning in safari gear, staggering 
with the weight of Cecil the Lion’s head, 

black mane sticky with blood and jaws agape, 
fangs broken and grey—while the dentist’s teeth 
are movie-star white, and he’s tanned 

in a recreational way, like Ted Bundy, 
who hacksawed the heads from his victims 
and displayed them, sorrowful and vacant, 
in his apartment. 

When park rangers found Cecil’s skinned, 
headless body, his tracking collar was missing. 

Maybe it sits angled under accent lighting 
on the dentist’s mantel, positioned next to the arrow 
he shot between Cecil’s ribs and which stayed 
lodged there, as he staggered across the grasslands, 
bleeding out. 

Protesters chanted Murderer outside the dentist’s 
split-level, suburban home. They spray-painted 
Lion Killer on his white garage door. 

A woman in Ohio tweeted: Why doesn’t a bucket 
of chicken wings evoke the same outrage? 

LYNN McGEE

Lynn McGee’s poetry collections are SCIENCE SAYS YES (Broadstone Books, forthcoming); Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019), Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and two prize-winning chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press). Lynn McGee and José Pelauz co-wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House, 2021). www.lynnmcgee.com