| ZYGOTE IN MY COFFEE.COM |
| ***BIO*** I am a published writer whose poetry has appeared in Avenue, The Lilliput Review, The New Yinzer, The Blue Collar Review, The Deep Cleveland Junkmail Oracle, The ARTvoice, Modern Drunkard Magazine, The American Dissident, Words-Myth, My Favorite Bullet, The Main Street Rag, Thieves Jargon, Underground Voices, Why Vandalism, and Eclectica. My short fiction has appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and my column The Lost Yinzer appears quarterly in The New Yinzer (www.newyinzer.com). My book of poems The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch Out is coming out via Six Gallery Press in July 2008. |
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| © 2008 zygoteinmycoffee Ink. |
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| grocery store check out girl |
| by John Grochalski |
| she has tousled black hair
that is cut at an angle, and she wears these retro 1980s clothes like school girl skirts with black stockings and neon headbands. she looks like the kind that used to give me hell back in pittsburgh back in the real 1980s a decade not so good for me but other people liked it and they have parties for the 1980s now and anyway i'm always scared to approach this girl i want to take my apples and oranges to someone else, maybe the old mexican at the express line but she's always talking to this redhead old bag for too long. plus my grocery check-out girl's lines are always the shortest probably because her eyes can steam through a man, and women probably hate her with such a fine jealousy and every sweating pervert that would like to feel a sixteen year-old's tits stay away from her because she's enough to make them reach across the counter and go for broke. i should stay away from her, too. but i guess i get a sense of nostalgia when i see her tossing potatoes in plastic bags, and that draws me toward her line. and i always try to find a way to be cool while she rings me up, and i say "hi" and "thank you" and i act like the world has me by the balls (which it usually does) and she says nothing, doesn't even give me a look. and it is that finite cruelness that fills me with such a sense of whimsy and longing for the past, despite it's inherent truth. oh, my little grocery store check-out girl in little brooklyn, new york you're probably breaking teen boy hearts all over the borough. thank you for making me feel fifteen again without all the tangible pain and agony and unrequited lust and without all the secret dried up toilet paper and napkins that went along with that, too. |
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| Sept. 2008 |
| 110 |