They built a supermarket in the old Robert’s field.
The locals raised a fit—There’s already a supermarket
not half a mile from here! one might have shouted,
correctly. That huge plane of tar a skating beacon, a
herald of the apocalypse. Then Taco Bell started building
in the tall grass lot along the frontage road—just past
the bank—and the latest horseman was released.
Are you too good for McDonald’s down 65?
Honeywell closed their Minnesota plant quietly
and the addition of warning stickers on album covers
would save the children along with D.A.R.E., Nancy
and Tipper directing the conversation, for some reason.
Cub Foods and Rainbow Foods battled it out for years,
raising and lowering prices like bareknuckle boxers
that know not to throw hand-breaking haymakers.
Control Data followed the Berlin Wall in ruin
and Reaganomics ramped up its campaign of, Ew!
And Ortega’s Midwest division ran ads of a generic
Pancho Villa unable to eat a taco without breaking it,
while everyone in this enlightened neighborhood
knows you roll up one end of your soft taco to contain
the ground ‘beef’, cheese and its grease. Otherwise, like
a neighborhood that just lost its last bank, speckled with
vacants reminiscent of the once ubiquitous robin’s eggs,
the ‘good stuff’ will have already jumped ship
to developing regions, better school districts—
like that bullet brocaded bandito being peppered
with tacostuff on the bulky CRT TV—I hate that,
I hate when that happens!

Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Rattle, Meridian, North American Review, New York Quarterly, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journal Coastal Shelf.