pre-cut peaches

There’s an orange-haired girl I know
Who’s so plugged up with secrets
That she can no longer speak.
She dreams of a lake where
Seaweed grows in the deep - every night
A new creature beckons her down
With them to sleep. The water is black
And still once she’s below the weeds;
The floor is packed with pink styrofoam
Puffs; “fragile, do not shake” is printed on
The cardboard underneath. When
She reaches down to shake the ground,
Her hair is sucked into the drain of a sink.
And she begins to spin, marbling there -
Paint from a can - her body whirling
Around at its ends.

At the grocery store one day,
She chooses a cart whose wheel is
Rickety, angled sideways,
So that it steers her slightly
To the left. An hour later she finds
She’s circled the same aisle eight times,
And filled her cart with frozen items -
Mainly pre-cut peaches in plastic bags
That grow wet, the fruit softening
Inside, leaving a trail of water
Behind, on which she slips and falls,
Tits up, her arms spread wide.

She takes a breath, stands,
And walks away.

To the laundromat she goes, where
She pays a machine to tumble water
- No clothes -
Except the pair of socks she wore today:
She’ll remove and wash them alone. She
Presses the play button and walks to a chair
Where a pink pen with a fuzzy top awaits
​- She leaves it there -
And sits in the seat beside it, watching
Her argyle socks spin in the
TV.

At minute 33
A car outside backfires, the noise pulls
Her gaze away and - quick -
She lunges for the pen and picks a piece of paper up
Off the floor below her seat. On the back of it
- A receipt -
She begins to tell one of her stories,
Then drops it where it was found -
It lands upside-down, so that all she sees
Is a charge of $0.88,
Exactly.
​
From that day forward she writes her secrets
On the backs of found receipts.
Some days it helps her sleep
But most days it keeps her awake
Thinking about her stories, and
Which she’ll share the next day.
She can’t remember how the creatures
From the black lake pulled her down and
She’s content - better off - she thinks,
Because at least she doesn’t dream
And she can sit and write in the laundromat
Without running a nearly empty
Washing machine.