The speaker starts with an ordinary dinner and makes it strangely unsettling. Cutting a squash becomes slitting open a womb, and the vegetables turn into infants, bodies, blood. Nothing on the plate is just food; it was all alive, and the speaker knows it. The line "The boundaries are not clear" sums up the idea: the gap between eater and eaten, human and animal, life and meat, is thinner than we like to think.
The dog swallowing a nest of mice and the mountain lion story push this further. The dog's meal is almost gentle, as the mice slide down "like little pink pills," becoming dog. The last stanza turns the idea on us. The biologist's blunt remark, that what was left of the woman "looked an awful lot like meat," reminds us that humans can be eaten too.
The tone is calm, matter-of-fact and darkly wry, with a quiet unease underneath. The speaker doesn't panic or moralize, just accepts the cycle.