This is the catalog’s most sustained exercise in comic disgust, and it works because every revolting image is load-bearing—each terrible food carries a memory, and each memory carries love. The opening framing devices stack absurdity: “My trauma menu” sets the confessional tone, then the bolded “A Mad Max Happy Meal” yokes post-apocalyptic cinema to children’s fast food, and “Something I can’t quite digest” operates on two levels simultaneously—literal nausea and emotional processing. The “Limburger and Liver Sausage” subtitle introduces the poem’s governing conceit, and the parenthetical “(The perfect pear. / An ode to dad’s / Everywhere.)” is a triple play: “pear” for “pair” is the dad-joke homophone the poem is already becoming, and the misplaced apostrophe in “dad’s” reads as either deliberate dialect or the kind of grammatical casualness that is itself a class marker. The middle section builds through a sensory catalog of wrongness—polarized direction, destructive taste, nausea—that parallels the disorientation of childhood in a household where the food was terrible but the love was fierce. The “porcelain / Queen” (toilet elevated to royalty) is a Plahm signature move: taking something low and giving it a title. The poem’s emotional center arrives with the father’s quoted philosophy: “If it smells like hell, / It builds character.” This is the entire poem compressed into a couplet—the working-class conviction that enduring unpleasantness is itself a form of education, that suffering builds something. “Love you dad. / Also, mom.” is devastating in its casualness: the afterthought is the whole point. The “Also, mom” is not dismissive but honest—this is a poem about the father, and the mother gets acknowledged with the same matter-of-fact directness the family apparently used for everything. The grease-stained wax paper memory and the “chickins'” (dialect spelling performing the father’s voice) ground the poem in specific material reality: this family saved everything, wasted nothing, and turned leftovers into breakfast. The “scrambled brain ‘n’ eggs” / “Nothin’ better than awful. / I mean, offal.” pivot is the poem’s best wordplay—the self-correction performs both the speaker’s verbal clumsiness and the actual substance of the meal. The closing “steel burger” fantasy (fried crushed steel, used motor oil cheese, pulverized rubber tire buns) pushes the conceit into industrial surrealism, the father’s kitchen reimagined as a machine shop. The card-format closing—”You’re supposed to laugh, / Dad… / It’s funny stupid.”—breaks the fourth wall to reveal what the entire poem has been: a son trying to make his father laugh, using the only shared language they have, which is terrible food and the love underneath it.

A deceptively sophisticated poem wearing a clown suit. Beneath the gross-out humor operates one of the catalog’s most emotionally complex family portraits, and the fact that it never once drops the comic register to announce its own tenderness is precisely what makes it tender. The wordplay is relentless and almost entirely functional: “pear/pair,” “awful/offal,” “scrambled brain/scrambled egg,” the porcelain Queen—each joke carries narrative and emotional information simultaneously. The father’s voice, rendered through dialect spelling (“chickins’,” “Nothin'”) and quoted maxims, is one of the few fully realized secondary characters in the catalog, and his philosophy of building character through culinary suffering is both absurd and recognizable to anyone who grew up in a house where food was fuel, not art. The closing card-format frame is the right structural choice—it allows the poem to acknowledge its own performance (“It’s funny stupid”) without undermining the emotion underneath. Where the piece occasionally loses momentum is in the middle stanzas of sensory disorientation (polarized, up/down, taste/nausea), which circle the disgust metaphor one or two beats longer than necessary before the specific memories arrive to rescue the poem from abstraction. But the “steel burger” closing image—industrial materials rendered as a recipe—is inspired, and “Love you dad. / Also, mom.” may be the most honest two-line family portrait in the entire collection. Published the same day as “I’ve Been Hexed! I’ve Been Blessed!” the two poems together reveal Plahm working through different registers of inheritance: one magical, one culinary, both fundamentally about what gets passed down and what you do with it.