Government Cheese

The best enchiladas I ever ate were made
with orange government cheese.
The cheese grated impeccably,
complimented the carmelized onion
and tortillas de maize.

It’s funny how even poverty has
certain period sensibilities:
the Depression poor were Dust Bowl drab,
and Post-War era Am-Way fab,
aluminum tumblers, Formica tops,
and plastic serving ware.

But above all, the Space Age brought us
government surplus:
bricks of cheese in cardboard boxes
we were still eating our way through them
as late as 1989.

My favorite snack then was plain Saltines
with government cheese,
and we had no idea we were drinking
milk thick with hormones and steroids,
we only knew it needed
to be muddied with powdered chocolate and Oreo crumbs,
and counted ourselves lucky
we didn’t have to eat the things
that Grandpa used to eat:
tinned sardines in oil, pig’s feet,
cow tongue, tripe.
I had never starved so I couldn’t imagine
the satisfaction of eating
pure protein. I wanted a Mars bar
and RC cola instead.

If I had a band, I would name it
Government Cheese,
and compose rock opera arias to my
hyper-chemicalized girlhood.
Like most poor kids, we had no idea we were poor,
much less that our food didn’t really resemble food,
the way the tabletop didn’t resemble wood, and
people don’t really resemble themselves anymore,
all neon-colored, frosted glitter made-up
bleached jaundiced nightmare dye jobs
Sputnik powdered juice mix orange fake-baked
and poly-blended shirts.

I’m not sure what this era is,
or what artifacts might define it later.
Never have we been more self-conscious, never
has the common man felt so keenly
this sudden inveterate need to document.
Never have we worn clothes so much
to be ironic (Wouldn’t nudity
be the ultimate irony anyway?)
Never have we ever been so
monumentally near-sighted

This is intellectual revolution, if I may use that word
in which the proletariat will unseat the historians,
inundate future generations with too much information,
and leave nothing to the imagination,
save self-knowledge.

We have a million details, but no truth.
A million verities, and no conclusions.
I’m not even sure why I’m telling you this now,
except I know I wanted to share those melted afternoons
when we all sat around the porch
escaping kitchen’s heat the window unit
did little to dispel.

Making enchiladas at the height of summer
was always a brutal chore,
but we couldn’t help ourselves.
In the pan, that gooey government cheese
all earth tones and grease
liquefied into perfect waxy puddles,
and glided down so smooth
with an ice-cold lime
Kool-Aid chaser.