It’s 5pm in the grocery line and my uncertainty is eating me
Enjoy Krystal Carmine's 2024 contest-winning poem from the Boar's Tusk 2023/2024 Journal. For more information about Boar's Tusk, click here.
********************************************************************************
I’m standing in the grocery line on the tail end of something dizzying.
Dizzy like the time I drank something I shouldn’t have and thought I knew what love meant. Sour and mean, a manifesto of what I thought it meant to be
Alive
Rebellion is what I brand it as, buying everything off brand, relishing in the burn
of it, who knew
rebellion could taste so cheap?
Oranges taste like citrus love and acid loneliness, rolling along the conveyor belt, taunting me. I’ll buy them, later peel them with my own two hands and pretend I'm something sweet.
I avoid eye contact with the cashier, small talk makes me feel like I'm choking.
Middle aged and graying. Wonder if he has dreams like mine or if he’s already lived them, is
this is all it will ever be?
Standing in the grocery line. Reading off the total every time. Speaking anecdotes but no one's listening. I’m not listening. Maybe he has some advice, like a god displaced,
smeared receipt ink-stained hands, remnants of what a writer could have been, his fingers Shake
The woman in front of me is counting out change, a mother, a sign from the stress
on her face.
A baby on her hip and a child at her side, full of rage.
I don’t think she has enough, putting items back, the cashier holds a look of annoyance and glances at me as if I should pay.
I pat my pockets, as if to say “sorry man? but are any of us doing good these days?”
Maybe I'm selfish for that but I had to choose between coffee or tea and thought that the sting from the fluorescent lights was going to kill me. It’s not like the mother’s the one who looked at Me
I worry sometimes that I don’t know how to be someone good, a deep rot inside of me like the produce that I'll forget to eat. Too late.
Child screaming in line for the novelty of life; a coming of age made of the loss of conviction through deceptive trade.
I want to kick and scream without it being an act of insanity, for the pure act of feeling wronged, because I couldn’t get what I wanted.
Sometimes I want to shake people and ask why they aren’t as angry?
Sometimes I want to ask people why they’re so angry all the damn time, after they’ve spilt grape juice and won't shut up about it, then I want to ask why the hell they’re drinking that anyways.
I don’t do any of it, I stay silent. Watch as the mother leaves, dragging out the child who kicks and screams. Watch as my groceries are scanned and do very little speaking. I’m standing in the grocery line and my hypocrisy is alarming.
My life is painted in muted amber and gray, pleading not to be a sunset that fades, time never seems to exist in this place.
I cringe at the numbers and go to pay, thinking about just how afraid I am of living a life outside of my own volition.
I’m standing in the grocery line with other lives.
And I don’t know what one’s
mine.
