Grocery List by Elizabeth Bolton

There is, here in my hand, a small blue rectangle of grocery list like the looping invitation to a banquet that awaits and my finger pads press it rumpled and wet.

You step, this moment, one foot onto shallow knots of airplane carpet and there you are, here you come, pulling up your Hunter S. Thompson pants your Fear and Loathing eyes rolling

and outside, on my end waiting it’s not raining but the panes have veins of water left over like the ones that have crept up my back over my collar bones and down into my breasts, some motherly blood-giver’s blue soft claws.

Perhaps, by the time you are here it will rain again; I’ll pull on rubber boots with a frothy dress and we’ll stomp over pebbled crunching mud to the grocery store and you’ll hoot hellos at strangers and frighten middle-aged jogging women while I clutch your hand sweating in my hand, sweating. Thunder will make way for itself by the time we’re inside and we’ll watch from the grocery store’s great wide wall of window with saggy plastic scrota of groceries the churnings of the dirty earth we’re stuck to and it’ll churn us home and into our bed in my dollhouse you’ve destroyed with your flat, wide and lovely feet.

I clasp it here in my hooked fingers, the blue list! the invitation, to the place where you and I might go out and be seen, tonight, if you should make it here soon enough. But you are far and

frozen, on a Newark runway. Its weather sounds of tearing paper and it does not need you,

though it keeps you. This earth here, the one by me:

it churns by mistake, if it churns at all.

Elizabeth is a doctoral researcher from the University of Toronto. She studies autobiographical writing and its effects on the mind. In addition to poetry, she writes nonfiction narrative.