Dinner is supposed to be the innocent part of the day, and Mary F. C. Pratt's poem takes that innocence apart with a kitchen knife. In the first stanza the speaker makes a salad, but the vocabulary belongs to a delivery room. She slits open "a womb of squash," finds "papery ivory eggs," and slices an onion whose "body" is "so wet and alive" that its halves "would not fit tight together." Broccoli and radish become "infants," and olive oil and grape juice become "blood." None of this is false, since a seed really is an embryo, but the new labels make us see what even a vegetarian meal consists of: young, living things, cut up to be eaten. "A salad of living things" is the quiet hinge of the stanza.
Then the idea arrives in one flat sentence: "The boundaries are not clear." The poem has no interest in a tidy line between plant and animal, eater and eaten, or the innocent and the guilty. Its example is the dog, who digs a nest of mice out of the grass and swallows the babies "like little pink pills." The simile turns living flesh into something medicinal and harmless. The alliteration of *p* and *l* makes the line almost sing-song, and "slid easy" lets the sound do the swallowing. The mice become "wriggling embryos / dissolving in her stomach, / becoming dog." That last phrase sits alone and short, and it is the title in action. Shape shifting here is simply digestion, one body turning into another. The stanza ends on a wry flourish, "I commend them to their god." Judging by the phrasing, it borrows the solemn language of a funeral, but the offhand tone keeps it from being fully sincere. The speaker seems half amused and half moved, and the poem never says which.
The third stanza changes the source of the evidence. Instead of something she did or saw, the speaker recalls "an article" she once read, and the secondhand, slightly casual opening feels like a story told at a dinner table. The facts are chilling, but the delivery is deadpan: "It happens more often / than you'd think." The victim is never named and is identified only by how she died. When the biologist finds the lion's "cache in a litter of leaves," the word "litter" carries a second meaning, a brood of young animals. It quietly links this scene back to the nests and infants of the earlier stanzas. The poem ends on the biologist's own words, and the last word is "meat." It is blunt and one syllable, with no comment from the speaker after it.
The structure helps explain how the poem works. There is no rhyme and no regular meter, only free verse that reads like plain speech. Yet each of the three stanzas runs to exactly eight lines, and that neat, symmetrical frame contrasts with the messy business it contains. The poem also climbs a ladder of size and consciousness, from squash and onion to mice to a human being. Each rung has its own predator: the speaker with her knife ("slit," "scooped," "sliced"), the dog, and the lion that "tracked the beast" of its prey. The speaker is not watching from a safe distance, since she belongs on the same ladder as the dog and the lion. The woman in the article also belongs on it, only lower down than we would like.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to preach. It does not scold anyone for eating meat, and it does not turn the lion into a monster. It simply lines up three ordinary acts of eating and lets the reader feel them slide into each other. The calm tone is what makes the ending so unsettling. If a squash can be a womb and a mouse can be a pill, then a person can be meat, and the poem leaves us to decide how much that should bother us.