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Shaindel Beers teaches at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon. Her poetry, fiction, and social commentary have appeared in Poetry Miscellany, Hunger Mountain, and the Willow Review. She is the poetry editor of Contrary Magazine.
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Published Spring 2007
 
"HA!"
There's so much wrong with a country where a woman
dying of ovarian cancer has to work forty hours a week
at Dollar General; and with the stock boy, who when he
finds out why she is in the bathroom all the time,
starts to call her "HA!" behind her back, which stands
for "Hemorrhaging Ann," and he thinks it is hilarious.
This, of course, is hilarious, because everything is
fucking hilarious when you're nineteen and working
a good-for-shit job where you can keep your hash pipe
in a baggie in the dumpster behind the store
and volunteer to take out trash six nights a week
and get paid to get stoned off your ass.
And I think things can't get worse for Ann
until the night when the cashier
who I've always thought was beautiful
in that over-fucked-underfed way that addicts have
comes in after she's been fired
(for shooting up in her car when she claimed
she was calling home to check on her little girl)
to pick up her last paycheck and grabs a package
of tighty whities (a 3-pack for $5)
and rips it open and puts a pair on Ann's head
and leaves the store, laughing, with her paycheck.
And I wish there was something I could do—
give Ann money, which I don't have,
so she could take her kids somewhere nice
and let them know their mom for the last
six months, three months, whatever
she's got left; or find her a real job somewhere
where she doesn't have to work with junkies
and get yelled at by people who don't understand
that if the sign says "3 for $1," you have to buy 3
because it's "Dollar General" and all the prices
are even, but I can't even get myself a job
that I'd want to work now, let alone if I had only
three months left. But perhaps karma
will take care of it somehow, like when the
one nice cashier, who Ann thinks is a slut
and doesn't know defended her,
tells the stock boy, "Steve, don’t think that couldn't happen
to your girlfriend someday,"
and not a week later, she has a miscarriage,
and he has to drive her to the hospital
where she loses more blood than Ann has in a month.
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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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