Poem of the Week | June 29, 2026

Adam K Bechtold is a Cuban-American poet residing in Central Virginia; a seafarer on merchants ships; and the managing editor at samfiftyfour_literary. His work has most recently been featured in Prosetrics, Fourth River, and Exist Otherwise. He was selected as a finalist for the 2025 Arts & Letters Rumi Prize for Poetry and has been nominated for Best New Poets.

“Cop/Bull/Tether/Pepper” by Adam Bechtold is our Poem of the Week.

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Cop/Bull/Tether/Pepper

It is not uncommon to see decorative plants in kitchens
spotted with colorful peppers and while the grocery store tags
will sometimes admit that the peppers are technically edible
they will still conclude they serve no culinary purpose
because of the heat.

On the island there was a farm we had to walk through to get to town
that was nothing but red chiles. At the height of summer under tropical sun
they looked like fields of Christmas lights as far as you could see
and the air tickled to breathe.

Drunk and underage and invincible I once asked a cop if he had to be
sprayed before he could carry the canister on his hip. He nodded,
he told me the taser too, he told me it made him that much less
likely to use them.

I wonder now if I’ve ever eaten a pepper from those fields. I wonder
what the cop thinks he would use instead, if he had to. I wonder if the farmer
in his one room shack has any measure of how far
his chiles have travelled;

I wonder if his ox does, who we often had to tiptoe past on the dirt road
knowing the thin line tying him to the coconut tree would do little to prevent
his going as fast
                          and as far
                                        as he wanted.

***

Author’s Note

I’ve always found it funny that some grocery stores sell pepper plants as decorative when they are in fact perfectly edible. It’s taking Baudrillard’s pure simulacrum and corrupting it back into something real. It’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe directly on an actual pipe. Throughout the years I’ve seen many instances where the real world and the described world converge and diverge in similarly distressing ways. The systems of control we subscribe to that offer a linear development from repression to freedom are one such instance. This poem is me utilizing the four title nouns to examine different aspects of the facade that makes up those systems of control. It used to be longer.