By David Dodd Lee

Featured Art: “Nectar” by Mateo Galvano

Frank thought pork chops, the way they were
cut and packaged these days,
looked an awful lot like excised angels’ wings.
But he also sometimes just
got light in the head. He was adamant—
I am as fit as a mountain range!
Though Frank may have suffered mania
from too much weightlifting.
Frank bullied his moods.
If he woke up feeling angry at the world
he rowed the demons out in his kayak
or went a few rounds with the heavy bag.
He was so dialed-in sometimes!
A deer fly could make him throw punches in the air.
If he walked to the gym he’d listen to the cars
flying past, how they stuck to the asphalt a little,
asphalt trying to suck up rubber. It was annoying!
Now he heard the fluorescent lights pinging,
lording it over the T-bones and bundles of asparagus.
The natural color of food—
the blood red of the beets, for instance—
seemed to be fading, as if color
were an essence weakly subservient
to manufacturing and chemical abuse.
Red meat, drained of blood, whimpered
from where it was stacked in the meat section,
bloated red by carbon monoxide infusions.
Frank tightened his grip on his grocery cart.
Cans of kidney beans are destined
to be left standing on store shelves
for centuries after the apocalypse,
in which each person will have long ago
been torched from their bone marrow
on outward. When the pleasant checkout clerk said
“Thank you for shopping at Schaeffer’s,”
Frank thought, You don’t know the half of it, sonny,
but said, “My pleasure” instead.
He knew the boy was just a tool, cheap labor,
a cog in something too sinister for words.

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David Dodd Lee’s newest book of poems, The Bay, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2025. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of the online journal The Glacier.