Dave Bonta's elegy turns the usual job of mourning inside out. Instead of a speaker remembering the dead, the people of the poem ask to be remembered, and the evidence they offer of their lives is oddly small: pets, screens, a riding mower, a bathroom. The American Dream of the title has shrunk to a house in a subdivision. The central idea is that this comfort depends on a talent for not looking, and the last line admits it: "Remember us who labored / so hard to forget."
The poem has no rhyme and no regular meter. It is free verse that sounds like speech, with ampersands in place of "and" and lines that stop wherever the thought does. Its backbone is the repeated command "Remember us," which gives it the cadence of a litany or a prayer. That is why the content jars. A form made for solemn things is used for tabbies, chihuahuas and a "pot-bellied pig." The animals are drawn with affectionate humor: their faces are "alive with imputed thoughts / that they thankfully never voice." The word "imputed" quietly admits that we project feelings onto them, and the pets become a refuge from the "never-quiet / barkers on our screens." Then "screens" is repeated across the line break, so the next sentence is hooked onto the last, the way one scroll leads to another.
The tone is tender and satirical at once, which makes the poem hard to pin down. "Remember us lifting our pets / as we lift each other's bodies / to our avid, lonely mouths" is the most ambiguous moment. It could be kisses, appetite, or both, and the pairing of "avid" with "lonely" shows hunger that never quite reaches anyone. The next line, "these ones we will spare, / these ones we will hold in our thoughts," sounds like someone choosing who gets saved. Judging by the phrasing, it may also echo the empty comfort of "thoughts and prayers," care that costs nothing.
The imagery of isolation grows more ironic. The neighbors are "indifferent," the streets "blank." The mower "sailing alone around the yard" is likened to a pilgrim at a labyrinth, but a labyrinth is a path walked slowly to find meaning, and here the pilgrimage is a loop of grass-cutting. Even the weeds carry a sting: the untended corners "host colonies from Eurasia." Invasive plants are a quiet comment on a country of settlers who think of themselves as the natural order.
The bathroom is the poem's centerpiece, and its boldest stroke. The toilet becomes a throne above "a vast / & literal Lethe," the river of forgetfulness in Greek myth, whose tributaries "drain every home & office." Bonta makes the myth plumbing. Then comes the key claim: "This is what we love, more than anything: / the privilege of absent-mindedness." The flush is "this magic trick," and the list that disappears into it, condoms, tampons, "unused medications," toilet paper "made / entirely from tree pulp," catalogs waste with deadpan precision. "Entirely" is the sharpest word there, because it points to the forests behind the softness. The waste "spins around three times," like a spell, "& vanishes / with a gurgle," and the plain, undignified sound ends the magic.
The sexual pun in "exclusive membership cards / & our spent members" joins status and exhaustion in one phrase. The burial instruction that follows, "fill us with preservatives & seal us away / beneath an immaculate lawn," carries the same logic to the grave. These people want to be remembered, yet they ask to be embalmed and hidden under the neatest surface possible.
The poem matters because it avoids the easy move of blaming someone else. The speaker says "us" throughout and never steps outside the guilt. The elegy mourns a dream that has already been flushed away, and it suggests the mourners helped do it. A reader is left with a hard question: how much of ordinary comfort depends on never asking where things go?