Remodeling the kitchen won’t expand your mind

By Ying Choon Wu

My fellow law-abiding citizens –
as we steer our carts
through Costco and Walmart
and Target and Best Buy,
let us remember this:
We are somewhere.
Inside our shoes.
Between the cans of soup
and bags of noodles.
Between crossing off sanitizer
and searching for arugula.
Between the chill of dawn
and the cool of night.
Between apex and nadir.
Between the arc of the sky
and our parking spots.

We are more than 7 billion in the world.
Each one of us is somewhere.
The bones of our forefathers are somewhere.
Our baby bonnet buttons,
the old TVs we forsook for flat screens,
the prizes from our Happy Meals – are somewhere.

My law-abiding brothers and sisters,
as we dream frontiers from our cul-de-sacs,
and pull the crab grass,
and whiten our teeth,
I ask of you this: Touch your navel.
We came into life through connection.
Feel the soles of your feet –
We are somewhere.
We are here.

Ying Wu is a poet and cognitive neuroscientist who studies insight and creativity.  She hosts San Diego’s Gelato Poetry Series (www.meetup.com/BrokenAnchorPoetry/) and is part of the organizational team for the Kids! San Diego Poetry Annual.   She embraces poetry as a medium for creating community and connecting people.  Her work has been featured in Serving House Journal, Synesthesia Anthology, Blue Heron Review, The San Diego Poetry Annual,  The Poetry Superhighway, and The Clackamas Literary Review, and is on display at the San Diego Airport.  She is a recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship, and was awarded honorable mention in the 2017 Kowit poetry competition.  She lives in the San Diego Bay on a sailing catamaran with her husband and daughter.

Photo credit: Polycart via a Creative Commons license.

This poem previously appeared in the Clackamas Literary Review.