hanta t. samsa

when walking alone in the nature preserve you have to say hello

back

to the middle aged white man wearing camo
hunting jacket,
american baseball cap,
probably,
a conceal-and-carry—

beautiful day, he says
as U.S. Steel spews hexavalent chromium into Lake
Michigan asthe coal plant chimneys puffff fffffff fffffff
arrhythmically as Hammond Meat Packing wafts a
bologna aroma
into the Ford Automotive air

as the man scratches the bulge at his
hip as he calls back his German
shepherd
as even the nature here is
not natural
afterthought planted atop
ghosts

I don’t know, do trees become ghosts?
Do prairies become ghosts?
It is Miami and Potawatomi land here

and if we’re speaking of ghosts
how many of U.S. Steel’s workers fell to their deaths before it closed?
and the residents down the road
how many of them poisoned by pet coke?

No, it is not the man’s
fault alone that further
down the road the
monoculture

corn grows
solely to fatten
the factory
pigs to be
hanged by

ankle single-
file
split
open
solitar
y

to be processed into sheets of lunch
meat piled warmly
one atop the other

not his fault alone that he and I
meet on this single strip of land
not
optimized
for profit
even the ghosts have evacuated.

*

I used to go to the nature
preserve to find some peace—

It’s just that growing up everyone was always saying I was so
depressing that there was no reason for me to be
that wasn’t my mother from a backward
country and didn’t we get lucky?

When the man in camo and american
flag cap says hello
I want to know

What stocks he owns
how many cars, how many homes
which breeder he bought his German shepherd
from did they drown their unsalable puppies
did he train at the police academy
which wars in the third world did he support or participate in

is he wondering if I’m legal here
what’s the gun for?

Does he ever worry he won’t make his mortgage
payment does he ever worry that this
has long already been apocalypse?

Aren’t you so tired?
I want to ask him
Tired of beautiful days?