Abundance

I want to live in Kmart,
slit from slick plastic
the winter comforters,
pile them thickly high,
and then ascend,
a story princess
beneath the apogee reclining,
there to place in dazzling array
cheap incandescent stars—
O canopy of my desiring—
in Kmart, all alone.

When I was beautiful,
the aisles did make way
for my long legs
and redgold har,
a burnished galleon
flying through,
sails taut, pennants aflutter,
though none of this
did I with accuracy know,
believing the shapes
and patterns of the world
to be simply
so—
for so they were.

But now in every
shopper wheeling by,
a human soul shrinks
from my cloudy eye,
stitched lip,
and bulging chin,
the functional shoulder
torturously higher.

Once, I heard
a Kmart mother
remark in passing
to her sister:
If my second baby
had been my first,
There wouldn’t have
been another!—

a statement
I most seriously
ponder:

would I feel
better or worse
if this second life
had been my first,
an only?

Now when I dream about
that redgold womanchild
in gleaming spandex
gliding up the aisle,

my mouth twists
into something
not unlike a smile

because she is
so frightened to see
through mazes of abundance
appearing:
me

though all I wish to do
is wrap my crooked arm

warily
around her.

Losing Your Phone Is Worse than Losing Your Soul 

Because at least if you have your phone, 
you can text your soul:   

Where are you? you tap with your ever-aching thumbs,
what are you seeking?
…

RUINATION, your soul replies, APOCALYPSE,
THE UPRISING OF WATER
AND THE DOWNPOURING OF FLAME!

But it doesn’t work in reverse—
you can’t contact your phone with your soul;
you have to venture out and hunt it down. 

And when, after the requisite ordeals,
you’ve tenderly extracted it
from its hiding place in the Marianas Trench,
the molten gut of Mauna Loa,

or worse, that narrow space between
the driver’s seat and the console
of your most recent rental car
which generates all the lostness in the universe, 

and you’ve ritually purified it with a sterile wipe,
and charged it, 
your frenzy of separation anxiety abating
as the screen starts to glow,
you decide, This can’t happen again,
so you start to consider options,

remembering how your neighbor’s brother’s sys-admin
spoke freely at a barbecue last spring
about having had The Work done,
though she wouldn’t say where on her body
the skin-graft phone-pouch is located,
a modification more intimate
than the most esoteric of tattoos,

and it’s not as though you could guess
by looking at her, decked out as she was
in that voluminous garb

which, you suddenly realize,
everyone but you is sporting now,
their hands moving faster than you can track
in and out of intricate openings and folds,

retrieving their phones, then returning them
only to slip them out again
at the next ding, ring, or chime,
happy marsupials of the new world.

Claire Bateman is the author of eight collections of poetry/prose poetry/flash fiction, most recently, SCAPE with New Issues Poetry & Prose, Kalamazoo.  Another collection, WONDERS OF THE INVISIBLE WORLD, is forthcoming from 42 Miles Press; it includes the poem "Abundance."  She has received a NEA Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, and writes and creates visual art in Greenville, SC.