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Anne Baldo is a grocery store cashier.
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Published Spring 2007
 
you're not an innocent check-out girl
it is your fault
the peaches soured, the apricots spoiled,
creaming with decay and blowflies. this is the first
lesson you learn, that it will always be your fingers
bruising up the plums, crushing all the bread. when melons
smack open on the parking lot blacktop, pale chunks of sweet pulp and green shards of rinds, it was your will
done. you're a shill for shelled peas, husked corn,
a con artist content to hustle the aisles
of the neighbourhood grocery store. with maliced bliss
you let cuts of meat molder, make the milk curdle,
gorge yourself on rotten fruit, on gouging
money from the honest veins of customers and
at night, after hours, you put on
your stilettos, your lip gloss, get
ready, go out
and break all the eggs |
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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