Three weeks
The most famous athlete
in the country wanted you as he
wanted many women,
but then, he wanted you
more, that elite gloss to your hair
and skin, photogenic emblem
of where you came from
and where you’d go,
Nicole, you pink-skied Los Angeles
of possibility, not his wife
but you. More than anything,
you were young
in those three weeks
between the day you finished school
and your first club shift,
all spray tan and Hash jeans,
in the days and hours you weren’t
yet with him but alone.
After that, did your mind
ever quiet, did you stop considering
him and think about yourself?
Because I can tell you where I was
in that thin cut of time
when like you I didn’t belong
to anyone, riding in the Chevy Malibu
of an 18-year old boy. An adult,
I whispered to my friends.
I was 15 and I couldn’t stand my face
in photographs, so none exist,
but people would have called me pretty,
no ice queen — not like you —
a girl lukewarm and unchic
though as perishable
under the right
circumstance. In 1994
June was no different
than in every year prior or since.
In evening the stupid moon hung
in the stupid sky even with the sun
shining, the piece of earth we knew
closer to the sun than it would be
nearly all year. I was in his car,
school was out and the whole day
felt like squinting through
the hot, greasy dust on a windshield.
Earlier that day, alone,
I cut my nails too short out of boredom,
binged mint ice cream out of boredom,
I waxed nonexistent hair from
my upper lip. I never thought
about myself because like you,
I was the culmination
of every falsehood I’d been taught,
the days whipping by me
as I willed my time to run out,
I was that close to feeling loved,
but that night, Nicole,
we turned on the radio
and your husband had realigned
your murder story to his own orbit.
He threatened to shoot himself
zooming down the freeway —
or crawling, as it appeared to us
from the eye of a helicopter. Slow.
Penitent. It was like any of the cop shows
we watched to teach us about danger.
I’d like to say I learned that day
about men who don’t think women
are people at all,
but I already knew, all over the country,
girls like me knew.
* * * * *
Retail requiem
Requiem for Ames, markdown chain rolling
high through the eighties, for fading brands
bought up and Frankenstein-fused, for stores
finally shuttered, their doors pasted with bright
commands, everything must go. Requiem
for People’s Drug, for Hills’ firetruck
of a toy aisle, for the hamsters balled up
in the pet section at Woolworth’s, for Hess’s
junior clothes corner, all the places I knew
were sick before they died. Requiem
for Wannamaker’s and G.C. Murphy, brands
whose Harrisburg fronts I glimpsed like cathedrals
from a car. Requiem for Phar-Mor, the discount
drug-shill whose rocketing growth, 300 stores
out of nowhere, turned out to be criminal,
and for that particular Phar-Mor I shopped
as a teenager, where in the makeup aisle
at the zenith of my insecurity, I learned to
sip generic diet sodas and dream. Requiem
for Encore Books and for Blockbuster Video,
those places I worked and whose registers
I know in my sleep—you haunt me. Requiem
for Montgomery Ward, grandpa that slumped
through the century but whose anchor location
in the mall had, no shit, a kick-ass electronics store,
bravely carrying on until the Christmas
the corporation called it. We mourned the old,
historic ones, Ward, Sears, we launched
their kayaks on fire, kept their corpses standing
as the analysts screamed their doom. Requiem
for family shopping day, for the trip into town,
for the blow out, the blaring commercials,
holiday discounts encircling us like hugs,
perpetual, near-constant sales, for President’s
or Labor Day week, the frantic Christmas rush,
your season, Lord, for months. Requiem
for Pomeroy’s, survivor of the Great Depression,
whose elegant tags I still find on inherited
clothes and furniture. For The Bon Ton,
who bought Pomeroy’s and then closed in 2018,
including my store, whose ladies’ fashion buyer
pegged my style—where is she now?—the building
still vacant, a restaurant’s overflow parking lot.
Eternal rest grant them, O Lord, the businesses
begun and finished, warehouses scraped out
but aisles marked in masking tape on the floor,
the haphazard fragments of signage and shelving.
Requiem for the people we were as we loitered
through those aisles, browsed and tried on
and rung up, for our credit cards, and for the people
who unlocked the glass doors in the morning
and locked them again at closing, the people
who lost their jobs, in many cases us.
Requiem, too, for the people who made the goods
we bought, the means of production bone-close,
most likely overseas, the slashed-through
price tag signaling deals that were too neat,
slave labor, subject of Sunday news shows,
conditions we could protest if we would only agree
to see them. May we guard against those forces
shuttled through their online replacements,
may we one day understand the psychosis
that built then eroded what it built, that was us.