62F on St. Patrick’s Day - #Poetry by Gabriel Ricard

62F on St. Patrick’s Day
By Gabriel Ricard

There’s a building next to an honest-to-fucking-god Piggly Wiggly,
and it’s usually a children’s theater. But sometimes,
you can make something else of the awkwardly-built stage,
or the long, winding series of rooms
where they keep decades worth of costumes,
and a couple of rooms where she remembers
people changing into things that didn’t really fit.
 
Doing honest-to-god-but-god-only-knows-what, as well.
 
She walks into the Piggly Wiggly,
because that’s what you do,
when you don’t give a single giddy fuck
if the story you’re writing in an almost embarrassingly-consistent,
smooth, painful motion of fury and compassion and vodka
is ridiculous or not.
 
Except for the part where she doesn’t,
she throws a stray shopping cart
into whoever wants her to sign the petition
that will surely, finally
put Hillary into a prison farm
outside the city where most of the moon landing
was performed for tall, blue-ball children
in military cosplay.
 
Watch and be amazed that she didn’t actually touch the cart.
That is fucking magic.
It’s the easiest type of magic to steal, endure, or borrow
during tourist season, The waters are absolutely sick
with tens of thousands of screamers
wanting more or less the same exact thing.
 
If you’re a waitress,
she wants to tell more people,
it’s a long bucket of shitty months
and shitty, malevolent rain.
 
What else do you have but magic?
And courage.
Miles and miles
of weak, unnecessary courage.
 
It’s one of these things,
or something else entirely,
that keeps her focused
on the beer and hot dog sandwiches aisle,
and not on the casual mountain of a dude
she just knocked into some bananas.
 
Call the fucking cops.
She would be fucking ECSTATIC to meet
another ex-boyfriend’s coercive father.
 
She fully intends to surrender,
but mostly that’s because responsible dog owners
in their 30s surrender for the evening
around 9, midnight.
 
The children’s theater is either empty,
or it’s filled with cohorts and their cheerful ghosts.
 
Or children.
It might be packed with other people’s kids.

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