Black Friday

Black Friday unofficially kicks off the Christmas season for many. We’re past Hallowe’en and Thanksgiving so can concern ourselves with decking halls…or other shoppers (as has happened now & then 😆).

Black Friday is a shopping day of epic proportions. It carries the mythos of putting retailers “in the black” again. Such drama must be captured in poetry, so I have done just that. “Black Friday” will be in my next book, A Somg of Glass.

Black Friday
 
I am lost
 
a castaway among the bras,
stranded with a cart
while my wife looks at shoes across the aisle.
 
And there are others.
 
One slouches among the blouses,
another is jettisoned with the handbags:
 
Husbands, each marooned on his own island.
We are an archipelago of waiting.
 
Somewhere, a fluorescent bulb flickers
like a memory of the lives we had:
one in his corrugated metal shop,
tinkering with a ‘42 Ford pickup;
another strewn on the couch,
watching the Thanksgiving Day parade;
me, in the red chair by the bookshelves,
sipping coffee and writing.
 
I stare at the opposite wall,
tracing and retracing the lines
of my children’s faces.
Will I see them again?
 
A black boot with a silver buckle
kicks my reverie to wisps and waves in my face.
My wife rattles off percentages and dollar amounts,
a tongue she is fluent in.
Apparently, she is native to this island.
 
She says something
about our daughter and the boots,
and we head to the check out.
 
On the way, there’s a man moored
to a display of food-themed ornaments.
Plastic hotdogs crowned with metal hooks smile
just over his shoulder.
His eyes are a cry for help,
a message in Coke-bottle glasses
 
bobbing in the Yuletide.