Going to the shops

Saturday morning at the shops, and all the others
help her get over herself.
She sees a girl with tapered legs and crutches
who smiles to her friend keeping pace with her
in the wheelchair
Their reflections in the Milady’s window
Do not disturb them.
Not even a black and white polka-dotted shirt
That hangs suspended in the air
From a faceless mannequin.

The air in the butchers is cool.
As she places her slabs of meat
On the counter
She hears the middle-aged man
Next to her speak to a mate
About ‘breakfasting at Musgrave,
doing a shop here, and stopping off at Woolworths
on our way home,’
his desperation to be part of a norm
as well-ironed
as his neat blue shorts.

The drab cashier
is training her daughter
with the high cheekbones
and small shy eyes
to use the debit card machine.
Her gold rings glitter
As she hands over the till slip
As delicately as a deer stepping into a trap.

Checkers heaves like a turbulent sea -
as chaotic as the inside
Of her own head.
The order here
Is random,
And terrifying.

There is so much need.

Can it placate
The loneliness
That burns in her
Like a mad man’s eyes?

A fat woman in a pink and green gingham tent
From which her arms emerge
Like pale pork sausages
Remembers something at the door
Dispatches a girl
to the toiletries shelf
To fetch Flex shampoo
For oily hair.

Two young men
Bare-footed
Even in winter,
Stroke their goatees
As they confer near the Chips shelf.

An elderly couple
Talk to each other
In a language she does not know.
Its harshness
Explains the wrinkles
In the old woman’s face.
Her shoulders under her pink cardigan
Hunched,
Her tired sore body sloping
Towards the floor.
She cannot see the man’s expression,
He is turned away.

‘Masturbation is not a sin’
announces a yellow T-shirt
wrapped around the burly
chest of a vacant-eyed man.

A small black baby is tied
To her mother’s back
With a soft blue blanket.

She remembers being
A child
At OK bazaars,
In Grahamstown, long ago.

The fluorescent lights,
And the Cheezers you bit a tiny hole into
So that you could squirt processed cheese
Into your mouth.

19.7