Costco Hot Dog
2 Minutes Read Time
I should be home making salad.
Instead we’re walking through a parking lot
the size of Rhode Island, bathed in the glow
of a hundred and one streetlamps.
Then we’re standing in a line of Americans
waiting to pay a buck-fifty for an all-beef dog
that sticks out each end of the bun in a kind of rueful grin.
I should be teaching my daughter the virtues
of a sustainable meal, the kind you plan
because you care about your unborn grandchildren.
But her mother’s gone, and I can’t face
the empty kitchen alone, so here we are, complicit
in slaughtering an antibiotic-stuffed steer
that left its shit-smeared stockyard outside of Bakersfield
only once, and at the end. How was your day? I say,
trying to connect with the waterfall of hair
beside and below me. She’s removed her ballet scrunchie
and keeps shrugging my arm off her skinny shoulders. Dad.
I should be writing about the March sky, how
the moon’s so big tonight it’s like one of those
weird halos in a Renaissance painting,
but she’s asking for a strawberry sundae
and I’m swallowing a lecture on red dye.
Oh you, who winds us up like little dancing bears
and sets us loose to uncoil
in box-store parking lots and fast-food lines,
what would you have me feed her? I should be
minimizing my footprint. I should be visualizing
our future. But I am lonely. So here, tonight,
we will each take a plastic spoon,
which we will use only once, and we will dip
into soft-serve vanilla in a cup the size of the Big Dipper,
and we will follow red veins of some liquid
that’s not quite strawberry but reminds me of a field
somewhere under the March sky
where real berries are stuffing themselves with sun
and becoming something even better.
Read more from Issue 18.2.
