Kat Payne Ware

Alternative Supermarket Poem

Is that you, Emily Dickinson—
bald amongst the rectangular chickens?—

No, it is the warm thrum
of the halogens, beating and flickering

like neon moths. I love it here
splitting the tides of the freezer aisle;

I love to thumb dimples
into the packets and leave them

as if a forensics team might sweep
through and take my having been—

coming up no match, no match
across the sheeny wrappers.

I love the bakery and its regular
loaves, its plug-in bread smell

I love the stationery section
with its Sharpies dangling

like an indelible butchers’.
I love the plastic dividers

their progression down the belt
marking yours / mine / theirs

to be shuttled back by the cashier
fast as a bullet train.

I love stepping out, louche
in polyethylene, the sky Artexed

with a whorl of white birds.

Revisiting My Childhood Bedroom

on the walls are photographs:
the cat is sat in a box
both dead & alive
eyes demonic in the flash
the words MATHS LIBRARY
scrawled below her like a subtitle
my mother smiles down
to child-height with face
smooth and dewy as a plum
beside her I am headless
holding an orange bucket
freshly lifted off its sandcastle
like a cloche from a hog’s head
clamping down on an apple
as if the butcher said Here, bite this

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Kat Payne Ware (she/her) is a queer poet and essayist, and the founding editor of SPOONFEED, an online literary food magazine. Recent writing can be found in PERVERSE, Fourteen Poems, and Ink, Sweat and Tears, among other places. Her debut pamphlet of poetry, THE LIVE ALBUM, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in July 2021. You can find her on Twitter @katpayneware and @SPOONFEEDmag.

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