Now What • National Poetry Month

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 2019
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.

by Solmaz Sharif
courtesy poets.org