We dye our cow-coats fox-red in the constellation Hercules

Fourteen hundred light years away, in 2019, The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment records a stellar nursery and something never-before-seen, almost perfectly round and lowing brightly strawberry blonde. They name it MW7, AT2018cow, or simply Cow. They say she was born on the half-shell or in battle, soaked in milk and carbon monoxide. If we were born like that, we’d be more like her. She’d take our first bites of grass in Orion’s fox-red firepits, running our globulous tongues along the constellation Hercules, its frozen forests, weedy asphalt spheres and shorelines. We would be born cow-like into a field of unmapped carbon monoxide signatures like strawberries, almost perfectly round and lowing in the Mandel-Wilson Catalog of Unknown Nebula. I say, we would like to be more like you. We’re wondering what you’re up to. She chews deliberately, almost perfectly round and strawberry, her strawberry cud in her cheek like a gassy sphere of bubblegum, her fists in her lap like hoofbeats around her busfare, rounding her light waves back to northern Chile, counting out her change.