With their noses shaped like rockets
and ancient vacuum cleaners, they
sniffed out not meat not bone not bloody
smear on the road. Not the ruins of a roast
or a rotting pumpkin on the stoop.
Still they hungered like everyday
mortal bears. Still they craved calories,
whelped, went rib-skinny when they went
without. With those strange noses, nostrils
like every different Rorschach blot, there
was one particular thing they could smell.

Old tattered copies of The Fountainhead,
or ones bought new for status, because it wasn't
the old book smell they smelled. Sovereign
citizen ID stating the holder was a free man
of the land, these bears ready to show you
a real free man of the land, going from town
to failed town. Because where they smelled
gold coins stamped with Reagan's face there
was always months worth of garbage and no one
to pick it up. Tread tread went their giant paws
to lick out the bucket of macaroni and cheese,
the peanut butter jars, the gristly T-bones.
The roadkill that no one was paid to pick up
and so drivers swerved around a dead deer
more than they ever had the living one.

Those rocket noses twitch-twitching
at a flag with a snake long after all the snakes
had fled back to the dry hills. The black snake
in the yellow field proclaiming "Here you will
find moldy bread and chicken carcasses"
the chicken's first eaters vexed to why
there was always garbage and why
there were always bears.