I end up in Costco around midnight.
The heavy doors of the store
are frozen open—one stunned
electric eye, the wide glass panes
pocketed into the sleeve of wall
next to the posters advertising
specials. Everything is on sale
which means nothing is on sale.
There are discounts for everyone,
for dictators. I rattle my way
down the cereal aisle—island
of granulated pimped juvenilia
and I hate to say it because it sounds
expected but this is where the OBE
begins—I am in my body, two fists
in the cereal box looking for a yo-yo,
then I am transported up above myself
into the steel rafters with the birds
looking down on myself. I nearly piss
myself. It’s kind of sad though, because—
and I should have said this before—
this is not the market of my life,
I mean, I am not down the street
from myself, it isn’t as big a deal
as one might expect. I just feel wistful
for Updike’s A&P and freshman comp
before iPhones. No one is wearing a polka
dot bikini or buying herring, it’s just girls
looking for pregnancy tests and boys
hunting down alcoholic energy drinks,
mothers tucking bottles of white wine
between packages of unscented
recycled diapers. America
where the automatic misters turn on
just before you reach for the organic kale,
everything is so fresh, Easter eggs
on discount, rifles on sale in the back,
a sleepy-eyed stoner with HPV
asleep in the walk in freezer. Point is
I end up as we all do eventually, dead
battery in the parking lot, resigned body
making that humped over S shape
at the wheel. Waiting for triple A,
contemplating AA, recognizing
I could’ve gotten an A in Driver’s Ed
if only I’d learned to jump my own car,
knew what wire went to what part
to make it go.
Alison Powell’s work has recently appeared in journals such as A Public Space, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, and was recently featured on www.poets.org. Her first book On the Desire to Levitate won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in 2014. Powell received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2014. She is now an Assistant Professor of English at Oakland University.