If you want to be reductive, you can posit
the belief that beauty is just symmetry

in mascara, museums, or gently rolling hills
whose hair grows into haunting fronds.

You can say the roads out here
on either side are lined with ethanol.

You wouldn’t even be wrong
you’d just be missing out

on the intrepid expedition from picked stalk
to pop in buttered buckets,

summer’s gnawed-off cobs
typewritten away by eager teeth

stray kernels ground down to slop—
our livestock, suicidally sustenant.

On the original path back to hominy
mashed into masa

cast in its shucked-loose skin.
This labyrinth of woven rows

we rush through in a burlap sound
barrier blur, has spread—just like us,

across prairies, bluffs, & acres
it probably shouldn’t have.

Benji Katz is a poet and musician from Cincinnati, OH. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University.

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