Fairy tales usually promise that the world will eventually be made to fit you. Dave Bonta's food-court poem turns that promise sour. It opens with a joke on Goldilocks, "No porridge here! / Everything is always / just right", and the rest of the poem shows what "just right" costs. A place where nothing is ever too hot or too cold is a place where someone has decided, in advance and for everyone, what the right temperature is.
The poem's main target is the illusion of freedom in consumer life. The speaker talks like a brochure, cheerfully and in the second person: "Here, you have choices." But the choice on offer is "a different / transnational brand of transfat / for every course." The repeated *trans-* sounds make the variety feel like one product in several wrappers. Even the grand-sounding "central decree," which belongs to command economies rather than shopping centres, suggests that this free market is run by an unseen authority. Cooking times and temperatures are "set," not chosen. The line "You serve yourself — who better?" is a small masterpiece of deadpan. The dash and the false-helpful question present unpaid labour as a perk.
The imagery is quietly grotesque. The fryers are strained of "plankton" only "once a shift," a wonderful phrase that makes the cooking oil a murky sea full of tiny drifting remains, cleaned far less often than a diner would like. The sea imagery comes back in the last stanza, when an overweight customer's stomach becomes "the prow of a distended gut," a ship's bow pushing sideways past the table. The same gut then "catch[es] crumbs in lieu of a tray." The body has become a piece of furniture, and the ocean the fryer started has now produced a vessel that eats from it.
That last stanza is where the poem's central idea sharpens. "Discrimination has no place here" sounds like a boast about fairness, and the line plays on two meanings. Nobody is excluded, but nobody is allowed to be discriminating either, in the sense of having taste or judgement. The only qualification for entry is "six dollars in their wallet." Equality exists here, but it is the equality of the customer. The fixed gap between seat and table does not adjust, so bodies must: some become "hunchbacks," others sit sideways. The Goldilocks line returns, and it now sounds ironic: the seats are "neither too hard / nor too soft," yet they are right for no particular person.
The ending drops the poem's grandest and its crudest language side by side. "E pluribus unum" is the American motto, "out of many, one," and the poem translates it into "all asses conform / to Formica." The sound-play helps: the short, flat vowels of "all asses conform" collapse into the brand name of a laminate surface, a word that sounds as artificial as the material. A national ideal about unity becomes the unity of bottoms on plastic. The judgement is clearly satirical, though the poem never lectures. Judging by the dollars and the motto, the target is an American mall, but the type of place it describes is recognisable almost anywhere.
Structurally the poem is plain. It is free verse with no rhyme scheme, and its short lines imitate signage and slogans. The ampersands in "Times & temperatures" and "seat / & table edge" look like commercial shorthand. The stanzas also grow uneven: seven lines, then six, then a final stanza of fourteen that swells like the bodies it describes. That is my reading rather than a stated intention, but the longest stanza does carry the most bite. The title, "Poem for Display in a Shopping Mall Food Court," sets up the joke. It imagines the poem as a sign on the wall, which is exactly what a mall would never allow.
The poem matters because it takes a place most people pass through without thinking and makes it strange. It also shows how satire can work through tone, as the cheerful, helpful voice does most of the damage. A reader finishes it unable to look at a bolted-down chair in the same way.