Ten words, two sentences, and the usual hierarchy of species has been quietly turned upside down. Jim Riley's untitled poem, marked only by asterisks, gives no date or setting, so everything it does, it does through language. Its central idea is an accusation: the animals we eat understand what is happening to them, and our hunger is the thing that has failed to develop.
The first sentence turns on one verb. "Parse" belongs to grammar and computing. To parse is to break a sentence into its parts so that it can be understood. Giving that word to cows credits them with a mind that takes their own death apart and works out its meaning. The poem could have said they fear, suffer or bellow, and any of those would have invited sympathy. "Parse" is cooler and more unsettling because it implies comprehension. The phrase "their dying" also matters. It isn't "death" in the abstract but a process that belongs to them, and the present participle keeps it unfinished even as the full stop closes the sentence.
The second sentence has no main verb at all. "Vengeance evoked" is a fragment, and "evoked" is only a participle, so the vengeance is summoned but never carried out. The grammar is passive, with no one doing the evoking except "man's un-evolved appetites." Whose vengeance it is, the poem never says. I read it as the cows' by implication, but it could just as easily be a more general reckoning conjured up by the killing. The missing verb leaves the thought hanging, as if the consequence is still on its way.
The most pointed choice is "un-evolved." The hyphen makes the reader stop. Written "unevolved," the word would slide past, but split in two, the "un-" stands out as a flat denial. Evolution is the story humans tell to justify their place at the top, and here the poem uses it against them. The cows do the intellectual work of parsing, while humans are the ones stuck at an earlier stage. "Appetites" sharpens this. The plural suggests more than a single hunger, and the word implies wanting rather than needing. "Man's" is a generic singular, so the poem blames the whole species, not one butcher or one farm.
Sound and rhythm reinforce the contrast. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, but the two sentences feel very different in the mouth. The first is plain and short, nearly all one- and two-syllable words, with a heavy stress at the start: COWS parse their DY-ing. The second is long and clotted with Latinate words (vengeance, evoked, un-evolved, appetites), and it takes real effort to say. The poem moves from simple animal speech to crowded human abstraction, which fits its argument. There are quieter echoes too. "Evoked" and "evolved" share their opening syllable, their v and their closing d, so that the two words nearly rhyme and are bound together as cause and claim. The long i of "dying" returns in the last syllable of "appetites," so the poem ends on the same vowel sound that ended its first sentence. The victim's word and the aggressor's word are tied by sound.
There is almost no imagery in the usual sense. No blood, no abattoir, no pitying adjective appears. The reader has to supply the scene, and that restraint is what makes the poem work. A graphic description would let us look away, while the bare statement makes us fill in the picture ourselves. Because the "appetites" in question are ordinary ones, satisfied several times a day, the accusation reaches whoever is reading.
That compression is where the poem's significance lies. In ten words it reverses a familiar assumption about which party in the killing is the thinking one, and it does so without raising its voice. It also doesn't resolve itself. Vengeance is evoked, not delivered, and the poem stops before telling us what follows. What it leaves behind is a question worth carrying out of the classroom: if the animal can parse its own dying, what exactly are we claiming to have evolved past?