Some days the market is just a market.
The oranges mounded in their wooden bin don’t threaten.
The trout sacrificed on its bed of ice doesn’t menace.
Even the man who talks to himself while he piggybacks the carts
seems part of the natural order.
But some days the shopping cart’s wheels shimmy and tremble
and you can hear cream curdling in its carton. You stalk the aisles
and wonder about the other women who push their cages before them.
What is the secret of their self-containment?
This one forages, this one pecks.
This one stalks the bloody slabs of beef.
This one gloves her manicured hand in plastic, pounces
on the perfect head of Romaine.
Don’t any of these women want to thrust their carts at juggernaut speed
into that precarious pyramid of oranges? Doesn’t anyone want to shred the skulless brains of cabbages, strew the aisle with slaw? Are you the only one
who desires the boy behind the fish counter, longs
to drag him behind the churning lobster tank, lick the oily scales from his apron?
Fluorescent lights wince, Muzak oozes through the sieved ceiling
as you lie down on a bed of turnips and bok choy,
open your throat like the stunned turkeys in deep freeze
and wait for the automatic vegetable mister
to put you out of your misery.
***
Denise Rue's poems have been published in Poet Lore, Paterson Literary Review, Inkwell, Alimentum and Miller's Pond, among other literary journals. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2003 and has taught poetry in schools, nursing homes and a women's prison. She is a two-time finalist in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest and was the 2005 Judson Jerome Poetry Scholarship recipient to attend the Antioch Writer's Conference. She works as a clinical hypnotherapist and is the owner of Wellspring Clinical Hypnosis in Clifton.
