"Ode to America" by Cat Wei from GLASS: A JOURNAL OF POETRY

Today's poem is by Cat Wei

Ode to America

To sliced bread
and every dog
day in America,
to peanut butter
and hands jammed smooth
in the making of an American
dollar, to every highway,
truck, and minivan,
to the drizzled tar
gleaming midnight
over jagged edges
of asphalt, to the land
of equal shot
and opportunity
to buy or sell a lottery,
a life, I want
to whisper your praise
inside the chicken
nugget factories
where no birds sing.
I want to feel alive
on a Saturday night,
while congaing in a Walmart line,
fist pumping the air
until it's bruised. I'm buying
bulk everything, pizza,
burgers, and fries, an onion
ring, a lie, I'm living it
behind the closed doors
of an American handshake.
Oh that slip-n-slide of life,
ice in everything I swallow,
my laugher splits frozen
and shaved on the third floor
of an office night
where everyone flees
and only the plants are left
I want to breathe,
find love, grow inches there,
I want to see a baseball game
where home is not a hit
and run, but a reckoning
for every ceaseless
worker who works
from death to death
through the silver ashes
of an American morning.
Gratitude, I want to say,
for the bodies that make up
the hills I've climbed on
high enough to see the top
is an endless piercing blaze
obscuring the eye's vision
of the grand pyramid
scheme of America.
I want to give praise
to the low percentage rate
of that thirty year mortgage
contract a body can yoke to
and call owning, I want
to admire the bird of prey
still playing hero in the trees,
careening and forgetting
how many of us
will have to die
before you listen? I guess
it must be easy in the suburbs,
in the towns where neighbors
never learn each other's names,
but I've never been able
to forget you America,
the ribbons you've made
of my loved ones' dreams, the sky
is truly vast and endless here, oh
as soft as the soft serves
and hard cheese,
but I can't seem to sing it
America, it's too bright,
and I'm too scared
of the dark blood
on your warm white hands.

Copyright © 2025 Cat Wei All rights reserved
from Glass: A Journal of Poetry
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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