Poem 44

The area in which I live is home to mostly families. I find myself shopping next to people with full carts and dodging kids in aisles. Most times I can get in and out using just the plastic baskets and briskly choosing my items. Sometimes I just need to get too much and the basket is too small, but I use it anyway. Perhaps my refusal to use a cart is due to my ambivalence about "growing up" and starting a family. I think this poem is about the allure and hazard of family life.

Bachelorhood

The supermarket basket
holds the gravity
of two mini-pizzas,
three bananas,
a pint of ice cream,
a loaf of bread it might take
a week for me to use
and a pint of milk,
most of which will find my drain
the driest mouth.
I’m holding it together,
pressing the top pizza down
like a lid.
Fingers aching against handle,
I think about getting a cart with room
for economy-size toilet paper,
a 24-pack of bottled water,
and jumbo bags
of generic Trix.
I cling to my plastic basket like
an anchor in shopping waves,
dragging it to checkout lines.
Hauling myself up on a shore
of Us Weeklies and mints,
I smile at the toddler behind me
riding in her seat on a cart
that would gape
like an empty room
if I pushed the metal
cage from aisle to aisle.

Poem 43

I don't have much to say about this poem other than putting it away and looking at it again made it seem better. Sometimes that trick works. Been going through a bit of a block/ lack of motivation lately. Hope this isn't a huge lapse in quality.
I hope I get another bank calendar soon.

Calendar from the Bank

I opened the credit union envelope,
prying out the new calendar, the pictures
flapping by as I fluttered the pages.
I tacked the booklet above my desk,
like a cage of days, to hang and let
one day at a time wriggle through
grid lines and numbers opposite
pictures of winter peaks
and summer in the Skagit Valley.
Each day flew over my desk
to perch on my window
and sing before flying off
to join the others. By November,
feathers and spilled seed below,
the lonelier dates, still confined,
waited, tilting their heads to hear chirps
in a sealed brown envelope.

Poem Unlikely

Getting back into the swing of things at school, so I'm not likely to post this week. See you next time.

Poem 42

I got the idea for this poem while reading Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, a good book that is not about salt or corporate mascots. The girl and her little smile caught in my brain and eventually I thought about here little two-dimensional cylinder of a world. It reminded me of remembering mundane things, how they come back around and catch us as if we were walking a cylinder of our own.
Th Morton Salt Girl is a trademark of Morton International Inc. It has iodine in it to help prevent goiters.

The Morton Salt Girl

Dress buttoned at the top
but doing nothing to protect
her legs from the wind
as it slants rain into nylon,
she glows in the blue of night.
Under her arm,
the one grocery her
mother requested
spills out even in rain
that would clump flour
and starch.
Kept flowing by calcium silicate,
the salt finds the sidewalk
to be trod under
the feet of men,
to turn puddles into oceans.

Smiling at her own footsteps
as they splash into the dark,
she barely notices the
nutrition information like neon
that gleams to light her way
on the back of the container.
Here, walking by herself at night,
she listens to rain against umbrella
even as it masks the sound of salt
and her mother’s future complaint.

It’s one of those things
that you’re supposed to forget:
a simple chore in fall weather.
Not much going on,
but traipsing the cylinder,
each step pushing forward,
you’ll be here again,
spilling salt or
walking with the rain,
in yellow.

Poem 41

See Poem 37 for an explanation as to what's going on here. Incidentally, this one is a tanka.

from Fulton’s Guide to Unofficial Seasons

Antes-invierno

November sky with
clouds like plowed fields sleeping
under the snow and
the moon a winter-bright deer
scrounging for stars, exposed grass.