As I led the man through
the crowded restaurant
and to his table at the back
he said, you sure are packing
us in here like on slave ships
when he could have said
anything else: packing us in here
like daisies into a grocery-store
bouquet, packed together
like the pages of a wet book,
like A-listers in a Wes Anderson movie,
like hemorrhoid cream in an unopened tube,
like pennies in a pickle jar,
like forty to fifty exuberant
rural children in an underfunded
classroom, like a family of polar bears
crowded together on a floating sheet of ice—
he could have said, even,
like your ass in those jeans.
Blood in a syringe, silver compact
vehicles on the beltline at rush hour,
styrofoam tight in its cardboard box.
Yes, I was packing him in there,
like textured ground-beef material
into a Taco Bell Grilled Stuft Burrito,
like Amish girls in the back of a white van
on the way to Walmart. Like bone regrowing
inside a plaster cast. Like the flames
in a fire, like the fingers in my fist.