Shopping

In the IGA refrigerated
to a degree for maintaining ice cream,
she wheels the chrome cart down the produce aisle,
where the vegetables are threatening
to freeze and bananas seem the sole safe fruit,
so she picks up a bunch—too green and too
many, too hard, too big. Too. Too. Two-inch
thick packets of sliced cheese plunk from the case
to her feet. Two-foot long logs of sausage.
Pop cases with twenty-four cans. Twenty-four!
The pop would go flat, cans rusting before
she could drink them all. The voice of God calls
to her at the end of aisle fifteen,
where rows of giant chip bags puff their chests.

–Shaun Perkins