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| | Plus Appetite
How to be =
being. Perceive
us, A&P parking lot in determinate
dusk, grandiose
hazes fill up the sky.
Are the sky.
Shiny, cheerful aisles of plethora. So encouraging,
talkative, like a small town, overlit mutter
of—two shapes: choice
or square, two durations: a year
to a day, these substances: flesh, sheened
cardboard. Appetite
as a function
appears dumb,
cartons eager and
unctuous, idiot
surface gladhanding.
Money as dumb.
And transacting entry or exit, gracious hiss
of the sliding back, chilly
exhibit, nature. We in the ice-case
reflector, caught, given
back surplus +
influx, ugly crustacea or jetsam and flotsam, old
Vladimir, young Estragon. Sea-wrack or hunger and
aspirin. Push
at our tissue, circadian
flaring of hothouse and peatmoss on sale
in the mall portico. Cough-syrups carny
the liquor store. So we
touch. We
are touching. Ellipsis of temporary sugar
crust feeds at our mouths, hot
expiry, chrome baskets fulsome
in floodlight. Cornucopic
mess in their stanchions and car engines
billowing vapor, emitting
a cloud that is separate and mingles
with ours and fades. Toxic particulate heightens
the colors that augment or gaudily
bleed, and waves exchange
stress with the traffic, low
constant muffling roar—wait, merge—constant
comforting low muffled roar.
—Frances Richard
Frances Richard’s first book, See Through, will be published in October. She is nonfiction editor of Fence, a member of the editorial team at Cabinet, and teaches at Barnard College in New York City. Originally published in the Summer 2003 issue of Boston Review | |
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