ShamWow

By Margaret Ray

I am undercover at the grocery store. 
I am behind enemy lines and the line is adulthood.
I am standing here, pretending I am not 
a child teetering on stilts under a giant overcoat.    
Do you ever have trouble finding your dead letter drops?
No, probably not, you are the cover, there’s nothing under, 
the way you talk here is the way you talk in real life,  
but I have to pretend to mean things all the time.  
Pretend that I feel at home in this life, 
say convincing things like I’m going home now and mean 
the place where I live with a man who scares me. I can’t remember
why it matters so much to wake up at the right time
but I have to do it with gusto just like my many colleagues. 
I have gone to the grocery to fill in the gaps in my backstory
and I am standing in the home goods aisle asking myself
how much copper plating do I need in my kitchen
to shore up my cover? Will this this shatter-proof 
plastic stemware give me away for the broken-hearted child 
I really am? I am standing holding an apple corer, realizing
they don’t have anything I need here.  

Margaret Ray grew up in Gainesville, Florida and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. A winner of a Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America and the Third Coast Poetry Prize, her poems have appeared in FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in New Jersey. See www.margaretbray.com.

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