when i count my blessings i count your friendship foremost among them.
February 12, 2022
Ajax Kallistrate
I work at a supermarket. I’m officially in Produce, but I pick up shifts with our to-go unit to make forty hours. Our customers are generally a sedate lot. Elderly people, families, office workers on their lunch breaks. In the nearly four years I’ve worked for the company, I’ve had only a couple of minor confrontations with customers that required managerial assistance.
Today was different. Today brought America’s ugly political landscape right into my workplace, right into my face. It hit hard. As a former feminist, former progressive, it left me shaken.
I was working a to-go shift. That means it’s my job to wheel a clumsy metal cart all over the store to shop for people wealthier than my broke-ass self. I get into a weird headspace when I’m shopping, so focused on finding the right products that I lose track of where I am unless a customer interrupts me. This happens often. I mean, I’ve got the uniform, the hat, and the name tag, and because I’m a shopper, people assume I know where everything is. (If you want shelf-stable pudding cups, I got your back, but if you’re looking for horseradish you’re on your own.)
So it wasn’t unusual for a customer to stop me while I was in the meat department. I was fixated on 80% ground beef, which I was pretty sure was out of stock, when a woman asked me a question about lamb. Knowing zip about meat, I apologized in that bland retail fashion, and suggested she ask at the meat counter. She turned away. But as she did so, I recognized what she had been saying around her generic question. Now my attention was divided between whether or not 81% ground beef would be a good substitute (and frankly why we need both 80% and 81%, and what that means for us as a species) and her muttered, passive-aggressive words.
She was accusing me of following her around the store.
Logically speaking, this makes no sense. It’s my job to shop, pretty much just like a customer, but with a huge rolling table and an rf gun that bleeps and bloops. I’m also at the lowest end of the retail hierarchy. Believe me, we’re not trained to do anything more than stock shelves and press buttons. Management is just grateful when we show up, much less do our jobs.
I was speechless. I probably had a blank look on my face, my brain only reluctantly letting go of its debate over ground meat in favor of a more important decision. Do I react? Or do I ignore her and continue with my job?
It only took a split second, but it was a conscious choice.
“Excuse me?” I said.
She turned around and laid into me. She said it’s suspicious when a white person follows a black person around a store. She said it’s racist. She said that if she sees me again she’s going to report me to management. Her voice was raised, strident. She wasn’t mentally ill. She wasn’t high or drunk.
She was angry.
We exchanged a few more words. I tried to explain that I was a shopper, that it’s my job to walk around the store. She interrupted me, repeating her accusations.
I had another decision to make and I made it, lightning fast. I didn’t just say that she was welcome to speak to management about me. That’s a little bold, maybe, but still polite. I didn’t just point to my name-tag which, again, is a little snarky, but still within the realm of acceptable behavior.
I leaned toward her.
It wasn’t the sort of lean that put me in her face. We weren’t even standing very close. But it was deliberate. I watched myself do it. I didn’t entirely understand why I was doing it, even granting the fact that it’s always been easy for people to push my buttons. Triggered, right?
My hands were shaking. But I wasn’t angry, or afraid. I made a third decision as she continued to raise her voice. I told her I was going to get my manager. I walked away as she kept right on trying to argue with me.
I went to customer service and asked them to call the MOD. I paced while I waited, my mask pulled down so I wouldn’t panic. By the time the manager arrived (for once I was glad to see the stony-faced assistant store manager who’s either a very hard drinker or a serial killer) I wasn’t alone.
The customer had followed me to the desk.
She yelled at me, saying she didn’t need me there, accusing me of being condescending. She told me to leave. I said I was going to do what my manager wanted me to do. When I turned to him he told me to go back to my job.
I did. My hands were still trembling, but I was able to get back into the groove (and 99 cent chicken thighs). When I finished scanning my meat department products, I pressed the required buttons on my handheld, looked up to see how hard it was going to be to navigate through the afternoon shoppers, and felt a strange internal shock.
What if I turn the corner into aisle 11 and she’s there? Will she accuse me again of following her? Yell at me in front of other customers? Call me a racist? What if she demands to see another manager? Should I choose a less trafficked route?
And I suddenly understood why I leaned toward her. It was a signal from one animal to another. I was telling her that I wasn’t intimidated. I was standing my ground. This job — as shitty as it is sometimes (and believe me, it’s shitty sometimes) — is my livelihood. It’s how I support my family. It’s how I maintain my independence. I don’t care who you are. You’re not going to take that away from me. And when this woman, this stranger, threatened to report me to my superiors, that’s exactly what she was doing — threatening me with the loss of my job.
She targeted me for two reasons. One, I’m white. If I’d been black she wouldn’t have said a word. Two, I belong to a vulnerable class — retail workers. We don’t make a lot of money and none of us can afford to be fired. That makes us easy targets.
The irony is rich. This young woman, filled to bursting with indignation, can’t understand that it’s her privilege keeping her blind to the nonsense of her accusations. She’s never worked a shitty job in her life. She doesn’t know what it’s like, that we’re trained to look at expiration dates and PLU numbers, not customers. I don’t get paid enough to do that. Hell, we’re not even trained to do anything if we see a customer stealing. That’s not our job.
Her job, on the other hand, was obvious. She was there to intimidate a white woman. She wanted to make me afraid.
I’m not even angry. I just feel sorry for her. Why? Because I used to be like her.
I grew up upper middle-class. I soaked up the righteous indignation of feminism and progressivism in the 90’s as if it was my birthright. I wore it like a shield. I went to college to keep from having to learn what it was like to live on retail wages. I marched in D.C. I listened to Democracy Now! I read the right books, watched the right films, attended the right lectures. It was all real — the wage gap, institutional racism, the misogynist media. I was one of the enlightened ones who was going to change things, make a difference, and anyone who disagreed with me was a knuckle-dragger too dumb or too brainwashed to see reality.
Things look different from this side of the fence. I even thought for a moment, Oh no, what if she’s at the bus stop? Only to realize she’s hardly the type to ride the bus. Around here it’s only poor people who take public transit. Black, white, Mexican, all of us with our masks on, sitting shoulder to shoulder, with good grace or not, headphones, earbuds, grocery bags, babies and little kids, cigarette stubs. It’s a melting pot of wet socks and bed bugs, smartphones and lottery tickets. We all pay the same fare (well okay, except senior citizens, but my point still stands). Just one overheard conversation on a public bus can teach you a hell of a lot more about the real problems in this country than any college course.
I have to get up at 5am tomorrow, leave my apartment at 6am. If I’m lucky I’ll have a spare fifteen minutes to write before I clock in at 7am. I’ll spend the day lifting 50lb bags of potatoes and stocking broccoli and apples. I won’t be following anyone around the store, black or otherwise.
I’m grateful in a hippie-dippy sort of way for the confrontation. I can’t keep the grotesque legacy of progressivism at arm’s length anymore. It’s not just a depressing theme of conversation with my best friend. It found me at work, where I’m confident and comfortable. It rattled me in the guise of a woman whose genuine rage over phantom discrimination was generated by the same intellectual machinery that ignited my own rage thirty years ago.
This isn’t about where we’re headed as a country. It’s about where we’re at, right now.
I’ve always been the kind of person to step off the sidewalk for someone else. I make space for people, literally and figuratively. But I have a much clearer understanding of where I stand these days, as a white woman, as a retail worker, as an American.
And I don’t have a whole lot of ground left to give.
There's more love in the artless sincerity of a grilled cheese than in all the world's fully loaded words of earnest sentiment.
December 14, 2021
It's November first. Leaves blow around on the trees, still green, cut up among gray and white clouds and patches of blue sky. I have no topic with which to begin save my fixation on future pain, potential loss. Abandonment, failure. It's difficult to stay in the moment. I still recognize joy. It envelops me in much the same way grief pours out of me, all overwhelming. But I vacillate between the saturated emotions of love and the rictus of anxiety that lives in my muscles, fueled by obsessive, intrusive thoughts. Is everyone like this? I can't let go. Is it my age? My sex? My long history of broken connections? I'm building a home, a household, a family. Is that healthy? Or is the question moot? I belong nowhere else. I have no other refuge. I'm building a refuge. For him, for me. With no experience, no models. I pull endless ends together, never knowing where the middle is, knowing only that I want to overcome all obstacles, master all daunting tasks. For him, for me. I still look down Washington Avenue on my way home from work, at the side- walk in front of the university, where he said yes. The happiest moment of my life, when the whole world opened up. Bloomed. And we did it. Together. We made a household. Together. We negotiated a respectful roommate relationship. Only gradually did it become a tenderer thing. A mother and son. My love for him is boundless. It encompasses worlds. Every moment of pain and grief and fear, every step inside the vast terrain of emptiness that has defined my life for forty- seven long years, was worth it, to be here, with him. Even if I fail. Even if I'm abandoned. Because I'm blessed with his trust, his faith. How can I do less than my best, to shelter, to provide. Let at least that much go to him, to that beautiful man, that beautiful child. How could I have known the day I met him how he would migrate through my soul to take up residence in my old, ugly, burnt up heart? To dissolve so much of what I thought I knew and leave resilience in its wake? To become home. Kin. Family. I want him in my life more than I've ever wanted anything in that life. It's November first. It's a new lease. It's a second year in our home. It's a third year of loving Eli.
December 13, 2021
when you say a woman is a goddess, remember that Eris was a goddess too. it's Thanksgiving and I'm thinking of my mother, a woman so powerful she traveled back in time to the origin of the human race and, Pandora like, granted us a gift we never wanted: a fear of abandonment so strong we give up before we try. but unlike Pandora, naive and innocent, my mother did it out of spite. she was born a black hole. not a normal black hole, or even a super massive black hole, but the black hole at the center of the universe. she was the Big Bang. she was the originator who became the destroyer. she consumes light, hope, little girls. whole worlds collapse. she is the solar sundew, the eater of flesh, bone, ash. her leavings, lifeless space bodies, aimless carcasses who no longer remember where they came from, who can no longer imagine where they're going. trails of dead stars, fused relics of base metals. she's not like our ancestors, the ancestors of mortals, she's the ancestress of the neutron star that shines only in death, bastard smear of radiation fixed by the eclipsing eye of a camera lost in space. unrelenting. purposeless. the cat that drops the mouse, still warm, she keeps her hands in carved out rib- cages, tent poled to hold up her fitted hide, a wicked pneuma exhaled over a blasted landscape of calcaneus bones never lifted above untrodden paths, leathery alveoli never filled by the only inheritance we were ever offered. why, she might have asked, need they light when they have no eyes? and she ate away the sun. why, she might have asked, need they walk when there is no path? and she ate away their feet. why, she might have asked, need they speak, breathe, crash through, rupture, evolve, awaken, when no elementary particle escapes the spiraling drain, the suffocating death, the translucent fading into a single dimension, into an outline, into an unlimned representation of what never was, a remnant of what never existed? and she gave birth to me.
November 26, 2021
Self expression, however flawed, is a relief.
November 26, 2021
that 6:30 emptiness appeals to me most on autumn days when the aluminum light of dawn is no longer hoisted high by busy bird song, but hasn't yet been blacked out by cloudy catatonia, when my city becomes, for so brief a time, an empty church where i can walk quietly because no one is there, when every brake light and traffic signal is picked out in isolation and the wind blows no trash and the crows can't commit to east or west, but remain wise and unhindered as broken clouds drift in broken bands in slow procession toward the high rises, their destination past the horizon, but i'm gone by then, on a quiet bus, with the windows open, separating seeds from banal contentment, knowing only how fleeting this moment is, in autumn, on my way to work, to hear a lone crow's call.
October 8, 2021
laugh if you want to call me produce lady call me man call me virgin call me Ripley call me lesbo go ahead feel good feel superior laugh that self-satisfied laugh at my expense cause i can afford it now cause your words don't matter anymore to me cause i don't got to compromise anymore cause i don't got to sacrifice myself anymore when i walk out that door at 6am when i talk to myself to keep myself on track when i have a bad day when i got to recite my recitation on the bus to keep myself to myself i can still walk with my head held high burdened only by my warm coat and my lunch bag and my groceries and not anymore by self-hate and shame i'm not ashamed of who i am i'm not ashamed of how i live i don't need anything from you you stranger you unknown don't speak to me don't look at me don't stand near me i don't owe you anything i don't need your permission your understanding your good graces your charity your blessing and you don't need my fake smile my fake laugh my retail face cause that's all i got for you cause i don't need to forgive cause i can't forget it's somewhere in my bones down below the shower drain and the sticky carpet fibers and the warm plastic linoleum i couldn't find it if i wanted to and i don't i just want to keep on walking until i can't walk anymore and when i can't well somewhere inside i know the deal i know her name i'll take it with me i've got five minutes here i am this is all i'll ever be this is more than i've ever been i got what i need i fade it's leaf fall it's rain you feel you can't hear it's winter silence it's time o'clock it's all alone good morning
October 8, 2021
remember, you're meat. you're adipose tissue. you're organs. you're glands. you can be replaced by a machine by a plastic mouth by a whore by a neighbor by a child by an animal by a warm wet hole penned in light draws the eyes to your tits your ass your crotch draws the bull's eye to you, meat. dick plow. human toilet. emptied into. dripping. brains or inhuman smear. fertile abandonment. subject. abject. nothing you do matters. nothing you think matters. nothing matters over meat. not your goals, not your ambitions. not your thoughts. not your art. not your future. you are lobotomized. you are nothing but meat. remember. you aren't a person. you aren't an individual. you aren't autonomous. you aren't free. you aren't powerful. you are meat. remember. with every word, with every look, with every motion. you are nothing. you are meat. you are prey. you are subject, object. internalized meat. remember. there is no beauty. there is no love. whatever you were thinking, whatever you were doing, whatever you were feeling, this is your reminder, meat. none of it matters. you don't matter. you are nothing. you are meat.
October 8, 2021
"You look tired."
Are you saying I can't do my job?
Are you saying I shouldn't be here?
Are you saying I'm old, ugly, worn out?
Useless?
("I can't," she said.)
Why do you persist? Insist? I hold up
my head by way of meat and bone.
Isn't that enough?
What else am I supposed to do? To be?
("I can't do this.")
You whose name I know
only from the plastic
rectangle pinned to
your uniform like
mine: "At your
service
since"
it's
not a
prison, a
school, I'm not
here for an interview,
an audition, a loan, a raise,
do I have to smile to assuage
your false concern? ("I can't do
this anymore,") you nobody to
a nobody who just wants to
get through one more
shift, one more bus
ride, one more
alarm, one
more
look
at
a
face
I only
recognize through
long acquaintance
with plum eyes
and bird beak
and slash
mouth
and
(she said, I was told,
she walked away,
no two weeks,
no notice)
I wonder sometimes do I look
different, to them, to their
animal gazes skipping
over me like ruminant
tongues I don't
need "You
look,"
do
you?
("I can't,"
she said,
and
she walked away.
"I can't do this anymore."
Two decades my senior, we bonded
over suicidal ideation and cats and
men we shouldn't have let do what
they did and a mutual revulsion
for our own sex. "I can't do this,"
she said. "I can't do this
anymore."
and
she
gave me a gift, a definition of love.
"It makes me happy,"
she said, "to see you happy."
she
gave me a number, to the suicide
hotline she'd dialed the year be-
fore, torn from a magazine,
with a pretty picture on
the other side, a sea-
shell among bright
berries, so I wove
it into a collage,
and so poetry
is collage,
and so
I was
inspired
by
her,
by
my
first
work
friend,
before I
understood
the difference,
before I understood
the difference, I loved her.
she
didn't
waste words
on bitterness or
despair, she got out
of bed every day to show
up, to lift up, without complaint,
to let dark humor and sacrifice
roll us through concrete mornings.
That's why I didn't waste words,
that's why I got out of bed,
every day, to show up,
to lift up, my wonder-
ful young people,
to meet them
where
they
were,
and
so
I
was
loved
in return.
She will never
know how much she
meant to me, to my future.
I met my friends, my son, I met
the only life I ever want, head
on, straight through, be-
cause of her,
because
I met
her.)
I am so grateful.
I have a home.
I have a job.
I have a family.
("I can't" she said.
I miss her.
"I can't do this anymore.")
and
she walked away,
to where, and how,
I will never
know.
September 17, 2021
