Blouses is my department, Head of Stock my title.
I’m stacking shrink-wrapped sleeveless Peter Pan collars
in columns of pink when a caramel-colored woman
awash in a sunrise shade of red, approaches my shelf,
her smile nourishing as Tahitian breadfruit.
Selling blouses depends on where they’re put
to hang, at the exit doors, perfect for impulse
shoppers, mostly women who haven’t already
found what they want or can’t afford what they like,
reaching on the way out with a desperate hand.
Our eyes touch, her lip droops at the printed price.
The Fair’s been here all summer, tourists swarming
the aisles of the largest emporium of our imperial city—
to ogle, to squeeze, to try on for size, to snatch a trophy
of metropolitan adventure, impromptu shopping.
Inches from the front exit, her deed’s not unseen,
she begins a game of distraction to escape, this
I learn when a tall woman wearing a crucifix
big as a policeman’s badge, comes close saying
That one, stock boy, stay with me, and I follow.
I’m the last line in the war against free trade, hired
to save house detectives from violence, bosses from loss,
customers whose costs will rise if the pirates walk.
When they trap her on the far side of the revolving door,
she’s quiet, except that witch-eye curse she throws me.
newest poetry collection is The Truth Lies on Earth: A Year by Dark, by Bright (Turning Point Press, 2017). Other titles include Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land; Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem; and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places, which won the Prize Americana. His poems have appeared recently in Poet Lore, Southern Quarterly, Tar River Poetry Review, Spillway, and Radical Teacher. He is Poetry Moderator for Porstside.org and lives in northern California, with writer/photographer Jeannette Ferrary.