Ode to Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches, Judy Jetson, and the Sixties Version of the Future

I’d like a watermelon juice from a Singapore hawker,
because when I was five, The Jetsons promised me an appliance
that would deliver food from any part of the world—any part of the universe,
and I think about what potato chips taste like on Saturn,
since all chips: prawn cocktail, ketchup, all dressed,
poutine, jalapeño, and scalloped are already so delicious—
take me to Canada, because I’m starving for the future—
don’t you just love how meals look in video games—
fancy restaurants with goblets of blossom wine and floats,
entrées of bacon with rose petals scattered on a plate—
the food’s making love—orgasms on a dish,
volcanoes of pasta exploding, octopus tentacles, the biggest Japanese
porn star in the world right in front of you, and would you dare eat something
that hisses back, Baked Alaskas screaming oh ooohhhhh ohhhhh, and let’s go down on
mashed potatoes and scallops out of a giant clam,
thinking about our crushes, because food and sex, food and sex—
wasn’t Judy Jetson such a babe? Wasn’t she? In her trapezoid outfit,
white hair, the way she ogled rock stars, the way she was the teenager
you once were—the ultimate girl-next-door, if that’s even still a thing,
because girls like her don’t live next door anymore, and no one owns a house
and no one’s eating avocado toast with pepper on top, because who wants that
when you could order stuffed French toast and scrambled eggs with lobster
a pork belly benedict, and bottomless Bellinis and Bloody Marys
extra spicy, grilled cheese for garnish, but where are the flying cars,
see-through houses, robots, and slim space suits, latex, nipple hugging that were promised
to us, the mod clothing from Planet Mars—where’s the sixties
version of the future the way you see George fly,
Jane steal his wallet, or the flight attendants in Michael Kors
serving you mile-high club realness and a tomato juice and a bun,
telling the passengers it’s okay to smoke on the plane,
because this is a swingin’ time and we don’t know any better—
where’s my other world? But I think of my parents coming to America
from Hong Kong, arriving at my aunt’s in Chinatown,
wandering Manhattan, dreaming of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,
thinking they were some kind of gourmet dessert against bread,
and why not throw in rose macarons and a boatload of sprinkles
while you’re sandwiched? Where are those flying cars—oh, Mom and Dad,
I really wish you had them, because I know you cried coming here,
really hoping for that dessert sandwich, for a glass house
in the sky, not a white picket fence and only one international channel
on cable, but at least our house was on a hill,
the highest on the block, the other homes bowing down—good Feng Shui
since 3500 BC, facing the water, as Grandpa would say, but I know you’d both rather
look to the skies, pilot that invisible jet out of here.