By Stephanie Burt

No one is going to make
     much more of this stuff now, or ever again.

Graceless in defeat
     but beautiful, harmless and sad
on shelves that overlap like continents,

these Cookie Monster magnets, miniature
     monster trucks, scuffed multiple Elmos, banners

that say NO FEAR
     and A GRILL FOR EVERY BOY
are a feast for every sense.

Some would be bad manners
     to give or bring home-

so many pounds of oysters, so many gallons of franks and beans…
                                                                                                It is a sea
     that we discover out here,

where every piece of evidence
     has a notional price and a buyer, and we find out our own
among its premises:

a hundred cans of pepper relish shaped
     like lobster pots,
a big glass pickle meant to keep coins in,

a gleaming square whose effervescent
     label promises
the taste of the Atlantic in a tin.

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Stephanie Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. Her most recent works include the chapbook For All Mutants and the collection After Callimachus.

Originally published in NOR Issue 8.