Jim Perucci
- 1 poem -
Eight Months
at the Grocery Store
All the lunatics
work the grocery
store. They’re hired with smile shining iron
unrusted. Then they quiet
down until they quiet down until
orchid petals grow under their eyes.
Broken awake many
times for 5:30
resurrections after forgetting they are laid
to rest each night so drunk,
so sad again with the
crumbs and blue dawn’s nauseating tandem.
The tamed liars
share the same
rhythms, “Where’s your nametag?” and “Where’s
your receipt?” “Stop
thief!” and “You had better leave.” Everyone
walks like bones in the aisles, behaving
like ping pong balls floating on water.
Some plead to be killed, daily, but no one
laughs. There is something raw and unwarmed at
the center of every tease. Others
cut themselves to
be driven to the
hospital. They want pills more than ten
fingertips, because to feel bland, to not
feel strangled in the emulsifying
organic empire of food and guns and
spotlights and
the butter blood yeast raw smell, but mainly
whips.
To not feel quartered and swept to their lowest
floors until there is not even vomit, just
condensation and the elastic
reverberation of the unblinking confirmations
that there is nothing left behind their ribs, like a well in dry
summer siphoned, to not
know that there is never time for those
more lovely and bittersweet problems anymore
that spill the same fascination as road-kill.
Fascination that speaks, yes,
such violence does exist,
silent,
pitiful and carrying on until god knows when.
