6

A COVID Supermarket in Indiana 
Nathan Marquam

Ginsberg! I have some bad news about the grocery store. 
It is bigger now and I don’t think anything of  it. I wander 
the gleaming aisles steered by no one but myself, looking for chocolate 
hearts to gobble. I could say I bought it for a lover, but the lover is me. 
I’m not ashamed of  being alone, nor of  not being alone. 
Ginsberg, I dated the grocery boy. He smelled like onions 
and rotten milk. I unbuckled his belt in the parking lot
behind a flashing billboard and tried to feel nothing. I think of  it now 

and shiver in the electronics aisle as I paw through a bargain bin 
of  movies in search of  an angry fix, a five-dollar distraction to pair 
with a six-dollar wine. But you’re not invited, Ginsberg. Not tonight. 
You’d want to probe and question, turn the shrink-wrapped cases 
in your large hands like you’re examining a steak. 
There’s nothing to do but fill myself  with images—slick-muscled boys, 
girls of  slender curves, some glorious in-between. I consume it all 
as I wobble across this endless off-white,  a rotund and sexless creature 
fading to the edges of  myself. Ginsberg, the whole world is screen 

except me. I’m flesh and more flesh, rolls of  it. Every city 
I might have escaped to covers its windows and coughs as I pass.
All day I sit around wishing I did not exist, or that I wasn’t scared to die, 
or that this landscape of  screened faces would smile back at me.
We mustn’t linger too long here. Everything could kill you. Hurry through 
this tundra of  refrigeration and don’t stop to examine the cardboard pizzas 
in cardboard boxes, the pre-cut, pre-cooked frozen vegetables I have eaten 
hundreds of  times without tasting. Hurry through the checkout (you scan 
the vegetables twice, the pizza not at all, and don’t even wink). Follow me 
out to the parking lot that refuses to darken and try not to breathe in 
the fluorescence that hangs in the air like mist, shrinks you down 
until I can carry you in my pocket, play you through earbuds. 

As sidewalk crumbles to road, I walk the concrete line between grass 
and traffic, between your world and mine. I almost go over the edge, 
but you are holding me steady—your voice at my command, 
our lips moving together, no difference between space and time. 
When I am home, I’ll let you speak the way you want to be heard, 
through the jumping static crackle of  a five-dollar forty-five. 
I’ll set aside the movies, the pizza, the wine. Tonight, I’ll watch 
you spin, Allen Ginsberg, and try to untangle my mind.