POETRY
	Issue 03, Summer 2008
There Is No There, There
Jason Koo

        It’s a day you feel like dying,
and you stop at a McDonald’s
    on the long drive home
        for what could be your last meal.

        You sit sandwiched
between two minivans full of sleeping
    children in the parking lot, carefully unpeeling
        a paper napkin on your lap

        and thinking of the trips
your family used to take, how your parents
    let you and your sisters sleep
        in the car while they stopped

        to get food, warm bags of it
that would wake you. And when you woke
    to the smell of fries and the crinkling
        of paper, everyone eating their selections

        in silence, it didn’t occur to you
how fortunate you were to have parents like this,
    how that mournful munching could be
        missed. Suddenly the selfishness

        of children seems the greatest
crime against humanity, and you want to call
    your parents to thank them but know
        you won’t, your internal irony

        already kicking in, mocking
your situation, how obviously you’re feeling
    sorry for yourself, listening to this
        sad slate of love songs and tending

        quietly to the Quarter Pounder
on your lap. Can one cry over a Quarter Pounder
    with no cheese? You straighten up
        and look indifferent as first one mom

        then the other comes back
to her children bearing bulging white bags,
    passes out the fries and little cheeseburgers,
        then sits for a while watching them

        in the rearview mirror, occasionally
picking at a fry to let them know she’s
    eating, too. How miserable you were
        on those car rides. How inexplicable.

        What state must you be in now
to equate that misery with comfort,
    to see gardens in those minivans already
        filling with grease, to feel home

        in the weight of this burger
in your hand? It’s a trick of advertising,
    you know, and yet the care and continuity
        of corporations on this day

        seems curiously all you have,
you who are so unreachable, who wants only
    for those minivans to leave you
        to the bottom of your bag

        strewn with fries, the crooked
brown fence edging the parking lot, the sound
    of your chewing over these songs,
        these familiar repetitions.