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Leather coats, loose bodies, dry hands gripping sweaty money.

We, these strangers, jive like static, flyaway and tangled,

hunkered down over lists in the chilly supermarket.

Thank god I have a you to come home to because I have nothing

intact, nothing unified, the day is streaked with doubt.

Tell a man to buy bread, to stand in line, to care about moving up,

and he'll do it. We slouch, clutching our bottles of dye and sealer,

their neon girths so sterile, so distant. How do you kill something

like an overgrown alligator, deep in water, from the shore?

Boys with rifles pace the drab banks cracked with winter drought,

the mutt in the truck raises hackles, the brown vinyl seats dusted gray,

the smell of bleach, the windless heat, old baling twine colorless and

frayed like a live wire,

their boots printing cuneiform in the flaking stucco, then

the chrome/blond flash, lightning, the slap and hiss of water, a stain

oils to the surface, a silver zero widens, a single kinetic curse:

metal.

Each of the shoppers feels the pressure of timing:

This is the last, She'll call to check, If I don't they'll leave.

Thank god I have you to come home to because I have a nothing

that keeps me from making even the smallest smalltalk

when a clerk mumbles, snapping gum, eyeing a white line

on the brown hand where the ring was, "Think it's gonna rain?"

Any day now,

any day.