Free Lunch

Watch a man in a hot dog eating contest:
He soaks the bun in water and brings
it soggy to his mouth. Small quick bites
of the pink naked dog. Just last month, the skinny
California kid ate 76 hot dogs in 12 minutes.
He also holds the records in waffles,
chicken wings, Krystal hamburgers and
deep-fried asparagus. Deep fried! Asparagus!
Last night, I couldn’t even finish the pad-see-ew
from the Thai place. Laura says
the portions in American restaurants
are too big anyway. In Amarillo,
they sell a 72-ounce steak. It’s the size
of a catcher’s mitt. But if you eat it,
you get it for free. This is the American
dream, of course – a free meal,
a pass to be gluttonous, boorish, to say
something rude without saying you’re sorry.
It is really to be an asshole.
Funny how those words – “gluttonous,” “boorish”
sound like a greasy plate of food.
The French have a word: “gourmand.”
It sounds nothing like asshole.
It is perhaps how people sometimes confuse
the phrase “hoi polloi” for “hoity-toity.”
Did you know it was the economist
Leonard Ayres who coined the phrase,
“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”?
It’s always the rich who try to kill
our dreams. In New Orleans, you can eat
red beans every night if you know
which bar has “happy hour.” It was
a speakeasy owner who came up with that one.

Here, try a bite. It’s really good.

Michael J. Grabell grew up in a single-parent household, the son of a high school Spanish teacher and the grandson of an immigrant window washer from Ukraine.  His poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, North American Review, Southwest Review, and the Best American Poetry anthology among others.  He was a finalist for the 2024 RHINO Founders’ Prize, and his first chapbook, Macho Man, won the Finishing Line Press competition. Outside of poetry, he works as an investigative reporter and editor for ProPublica, where he writes about economic issues, labor, and immigration.  He is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize — in 2021, as part of a team covering Covid-19, and in 2019, for stories that helped expose the impact of family separation at the border and abuse in immigrant children’s shelters.