Welcome to Euphemism, North Carolina

by Michael Ceraolo

where Oceanview Farms operates
a Certified Animal Feeding Operation
that it calls by the acronym CAFO
to obscure what's going on there;

where a structure holding 12,000 animals
is  called a barn;

where hog shit is hosed off the floor
and then called waste;

where the hosed excrement is stored in a pit
that is then called a lagoon;

where the walls containing the pit
break one day in June 1995
and release
twenty-five million gallons
of the contaminated water
into the nearby New River;

where a seventeen-mile stretch of that river
had its aquatic life murdered;

                                            and
where the punishments, if any,
never fit the crimes.