$40 BILLION

Posing as soy caryatid, the merry dawn, with its  deckled
edges,  descended. We  tried to wake up to say  goodbye,
we  really  did.  Outside,  the  voices   grew  louder.   The
barges huffed in the green sunset beyond the tiger bait. I
hid  my  toes.  Ate  my  wages  and  ate  my  shame.   The
atmosphere was too rich—now erupting with inbred fire
ants.  The  river  flows  backward.  The  carb- o- hydrates
bark—

A LITTLE PRODUCT IN THE WORLD

A soybean thinks through the climate. Climate thick with
soybeans. Seams of the weather system crudded-up
with methane and bean wax ferments. Inedible bets a
day’s labor dreamed of. A sack of soybeans dreams of
cattle-gnaw in an open field. The days are cattle,
gnawing on bagged soy.

Days require less and less. Dreams of time, paced
evenly with food supply. Years buck in the hollows of the
vinyl sack. War provisions invent a need to grow large
quickly. Soybean meal’s the perfect thought for every
citizen’s tooth. Every soldier’s gut. To crud up the
cattle— “To help everybody in the world—”

YEAR OF SOY

Because the year wouldn’t stop—spending each day
gnawing its own ears—wanting to hear less of the hours.
The year was—for a second thousandth in a
row—composed entirely of soy. Expiration date on its
packaging infected with the season and the season
infected with hourly wages of its handlers. I could hear
the year’s teeth at the end of the river’s ear canals, biting
down on fine strophes of lite soy lobe. The diversions off
main arteries a swampy cut through other bodies which
wonder if a year has ever composed anything but soy.
But the years of soy only have their savings—their daily
deposits of your labor strikes, and what’s beyond them—

OBVIOUS EMERGENCY

Half the soybeans of the world float by me on the
(Mississippi) river. And to what end of what. As we
realize—much too late—that one miraculous slab of
soulful soy might both save us from and collude us with
the prevention of some corollary cancers. We were sure
of it now, strolling the spiral bean rows on the banks,
totally unaware of our soy-roundings. It all comes round
to—what we try to avoid, and ends up memorized by our
maps, quite morbidly. Fewer sugars under the cell, more
cells under the land. The regions fracture with fill.

Ian U Lockaby is author of Defensible Space/if a crow— (Omnidawn) and A Seam of Electricity (Ghost Proposal), both forthcoming fall 2024. He edits mercury firs and lives in New Orleans.