ALT YOUR RIVERS, YOUR MARGINS, YOUR DIMINUTIVE VILLAGES We are all as old as each other and the cashier at Food Lion does not check ID for Chardonnay, cards me next time for the case of PBR, looks at my license and says, You’re the same age as my mom, but you look much younger, and I think of her hard-living mom—of the women who come after shift-change at Moog for bagged salad and Lean Cuisine and ground beef for the kids and I want to make it clear that I am at the Food Lion with my faded tattoos again every day sometimes more than twice mostly for my kids since I’m the mom with the overrun cart and the yelling we’ve

ALT run out of toilet paper again we’re missing the cheddar or ketchup and no you can’t have that, but today outside the automatic doors by the caged propane tanks and water dispenser and Red Box movies and Coke machine there’s a two-tiered metal stand with hanging baskets of trailing pansies on the bottom shadowed by wind chimes with miniature pastel birdhouses on top and what I want to tell you is that these stop me: their song and their otherworldly new age light speaking at the top of their lungs trembling against engines revving and carts shuddering into one another after groceries are unloaded into trunks slamming shut—this music the best failure

ALT of my imagination which is usually stuck on the camo’d pickups or the home piercings or the plastic bags skittering the curb— everything other than what it is I think I am, which is part of this but younger and ethereal, so what if everywhere had wind chimes: doctors’ waiting rooms or Jiffy Lube or the DMV? What if they trailed after us wherever we went as though our actual steps on concrete or asphalt or linoleum generated song that’s not quite song but two objects strung closely together knocked into each other by randomly generated breezes—your cart my cart the beverage aisle: our trembling jittery refrain. —Erika Meitner