at 10 p.m. because you’re out of bread and can’t see straight swerving lightly through aisles of pasta like a wayward dandelion seed their pragmatism leeching the euphoria from your blood with the absorbent practicality of boxes and cans. Shelves don’t care what you said an hour ago if people liked you when you ate a lemon peel thinking it was a slice of mango. You’re clutching new fruit now apples, the fodder of lunches, the clipped beep of the scanner hitting your ears in an irregular heartbeat, in a pumping, a flushing, until you stand sober, naked and afraid, in the cool, misting air outside backlit by produce sections and eyeing how the lamp poles cast yellow shadows off the painted parking lines coated by a film of autumn’s sleet. Water catches on your eyelashes and the hair on your arms, along with the bag of Oreos clutched against your chest. No bread, but you go, steadily, to find your car.
