The Unreal Woman at the Grocery
“What price bananas? Are you my Angel?” –Alan Ginsberg
Her cart is mighty, for she piles it
with the semblance of health: fruit
that shines in the overhead fluorescents
with a fat coating of wax, vegetables
in cruciform, their closed buds rising
like small antennae from stalks.
She drives that cart like serfs dragged
monoliths into henges, scuffing the soil
as they went. She heaves the bags of plain
the cans of saltless, the boxes of expeller-
pressed tasteless into the cart, and it rings
with each drop of bulk. She coasts aisles,
bent at the waist to heave the rolling heap,
and from the way she slaloms past babies
waddling gummy-handed through the beans,
from the way she keeps momentum
past the aproned men who ask her
if she’s finding all she needs. She is not,
yet she rolls on. Her fixed mouth gives her
the look of knowing as she shuffles behind
the juggernaut. Perhaps the look in her eye,
the look that suggests the entire apparatus
might slip from control at any moment,
is why strangers stop her, ask her questions
she’s unprepared to answer. Perhaps
they want to watch as the cart’s wheels
roll away from her while they pepper
her with needs: where’s the clam chowder?
What’s the best way to get urine out
of a couch? She doesn’t know, and she
doesn’t know. Please understand: she doesn’t
work here. It takes her aisles and then some
to get her momentum back.
-Kelly Davio
***
The Unreal Woman is a Bad Person
and she knows it. When the staring child in the market asks what’s happened to her, she replies, the same thing that’s going to happen to you someday, and finds herself amusing. She takes up too much space—claims public territory like a small country unto herself, this bus bench her personal caliphate, this sidewalk her one-woman lane. When a man behind her sighs at her slow lumber down the pavement, she invents elaborate scenarios of just what he might do with himself, a sharp object, and a little spare time. She lets the rubber tip of her cane wear through, allows it to clack with a tin-can ring on the floors of the bank, the mall, pharmacy. Every grating metal rattle says I am here, I am here, I am here.
–Kelly Davio
***
Kelly Davio is the Senior Poetry Editor of Eyewear Publishing in London, England, and the Poetry Editor of Tahoma Literary Review. She is the author of the poetry collection Burn This House (Red Hen Press, 2013), and her poems appear in venues like Gargoyle, Poetry Northwest, The Cincinnati Review, and others. Her nonfiction appears in The Rumpus, The Toast, and The Nervous Breakdown, and she writes the column “The Waiting Room” for Change Seven Magazine.
