I watch my hands dissolve
in a healthy vegan lunch
spot while a fiddle leaf fig
stretches impossibly toward
the white ceiling and the street-
facing window, its flaking and brittle
spider limbs bound to supportive shelving
with fishing wire. What was my body

is now the table, is the plate, is the half-eaten
tempeh wrap so consciously prepared and deserving
of a 2% employee wellness surcharge. I am now
the iron table legs, the laminate floor made to look
like the ends of logs. I am the quartz-top bar
and biodynamic wine collection, the joists
and beams from the days of lumber barons.
I am the building, the block, the borough.

I have become everything and will dissolve,
digest, expel what cannot be put to use,
metabolized, returned on investment.
I think and it vibrates through nerves
which have become veins of coal
become spines of mountain ranges
and a pulse of underground magma.
A fruit fly, lured by the vinegar
in my dressing, circles my lunch
plate four times and lands between
the hairs on my arm—which in one
angle of light are invisible and in another
are a forest of dead trees knocked
parallel by avalanche or eruption.

Casey Schreiner (he/him) is a queer poet who has previously been a television writer / producer, author, outdoor journalist, speechwriter, and host. He has written for Mountaineers Books, Chronicle Books, the Los Angeles Times, Nickelodeon, TruTV, enormous electronics corporations and several beloved but defunct cable networks. He has returned to poetry after a short twenty-year break, attending the Bread Loaf and Napa Valley conferences and is a poetry MFA student at Bennington College. www.caseyschreiner.com