I collect random lies and ingredients I’ll never use.
I can feel the flutter of eyes from the housewives as they judge my movements.
GROCERY STORE TRUTH BY MARY WOLFF 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 56
The world began while I slept.
The day didn’t set an alarm clock. It simply began.
The world did not start off with a cigarette dangling between chapped lips.
It did not cut coupons only to leave them at home.
The day never sets an alarm clock because that would be silly. It always knows when to begin.
I push my empty cart through aisles stocked with colorful boxes telling lies to me.
Maybe if I had those damn coupons I might know which one to choose.
I can feel the flutter of eyes from the housewives as they judge my movements.
My empty cart is hungry for possession. I collect random lies and ingredients I’ll never use.
I tried to make him dinner the night he left me for good, but I burned the fish, head and all.
The unmoving eye of that fish on my counter judged me. I drank away the flutters in my throat.
I only came to the store for vodka. Not even the good kind.
I tried to make him dinner the night he left me for good, but I burned the fish, head and all.
The world did not start off with a cigarette dangling between chapped lips.
I only came to the store for vodka. Not even the good kind.
Today I found out that the world began while I slept.
MARY WOLFF
I don’t know for sure when I became a writer. I think becoming a writer is something that happens gradually over time rather than in one particular moment. I started writing poems when I was 13, and that was it for me.
Poetry is the easiest way I know of to make sense of the world around me. I wrote this collection of poems as a response to emotions I was still in the middle of processing. These poems in particular were a way for me to process some feelings of shame and anger I was unknowingly holding onto with both hands. I drew from my own experiences, like the chaos of active addiction, the fearful freefall through subsequent rehab for said addiction, and the struggle to make sense of everything left in that wake.
If you are a writer, go for it. Don’t hold back when it hurts or it’s hard. In my experience, life is going to hurt either way, so you might as well get a few good poems or stories out of the deal. A writer has to be willing to say the hard things no one else wants to confront. I’m not saying you need to seek out a fight for the sake of a fight or write poems with the aim of hurting your parents/spouse/friends, because that isn’t what poetry should be about. Tell a story and make it count as a way to reach a better understanding of the situation for yourself, and then aim to move the reader in some way. I hope these poems do just that for both of us.
I write under the name M Wolff Writer on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram because people call me Mary or Maggie, which is confusing, so online it is just “M” instead. The way I don’t have one standard first name could actually be a metaphor for my poems, because many of them deal with a sense of muddled identity or clouded realities.