A quiet, ordinary afternoon turns slightly strange in Dave Bonta's poem. The speaker has eaten lunch, and the soup seems to keep bubbling on inside them. Outside it is foggy and rainy, and the speaker sits upright, reading from a screen. Then a gurgle from the drainpipe makes them look up, and for a moment they can't tell whether the soup is inside them or they are inside the soup. The inner and outer worlds blur together, like the fog at the window.
In the second part, the speaker plays with the idea of a recipe for feeling lost, a "map for getting lost." The instructions are funny and clever: dissolve your points of reference, bring to a boil, "take stock." That last phrase works two ways, meaning both a soup base and a pause to reflect. The mood is gentle, dreamy and a little humorous. The speaker doesn't seem frightened by the disorientation. They seem curious about it, even a bit eager to wander.