Now What

And so I sat at a tall table
in an Ohio hotel,
eating delivery:
cheese bread

with garlic butter, only it was
not butter, but partially
hydrogenated soy-
bean oil

and regular soybean oil and it
came in a little tub like
creamer that’s also not
dairy.

America in this century
means a poem will have to
contain dairy that is,
in fact,

not dairy. On Instagram: a man
has bought a ten-foot-by-four-
foot photo of a bridge
he lives

beside, bridge he can see just outside
his window, window which serves
as a ten-foot-by-four-
foot frame.

My materialist mind, I can’t
shake it. Within a perfect
little tub of garlic
butter,

a relief of workers, of sickles,
fields of soy. We were tanners
pushed to the edge of the
city

once, by the stench, the bubble of vats
of flesh and loosening skin,
back when the city pulled,
leather

bucket by leather bucket, its own
water from wells. Then we worked
the cafeterias
at the

petroleum offices of the
British. Then, revolution.

Simple.