Sonic Boom
It knocked you for seven
in the frozen aisle.
It wasn’t sound.
It was faster than that.
You’re going through
the ice box,
rooting for peas
when, with a BOOM,
you have your life
play the drums
in your ears.
You hear the past crackle
against the present
and the present
seizes up
like the tins
barely clinging
to their shelves,
like the cereals,
in quiet detonation,
trembling
on their racks.
The end is nigh.
You make it out.
All you wanted were peas
but haven’t we all been lost
in a grocery store?
Haven’t you woken like you slept
on a funny bone before?
Faster than this,
the speed of this.
Faster than.
And now, a tinnitus:
a plane snoring overhead
as the seconds advance,
retreat.
There’s the whirr
of the freezing aisle,
its banality.
You paralyse
and think of every way
you never lived.
The sound cuts.
The dust falls.
And you see her
in gentle debris.
Paces away,
you hold one another
in a gaze:
an elderly woman
in a duffle coat,
her togs undone.
Her eyes are frost.
She’s masked
and you’re a gasp
apart, but you know
her lips are glass, chapped
silent, in smithereens.
It’s like she’s been cut
from card. Out of a box
of coco pops.
Out of the din.
And you know
you look the same really.
And you know
that you don’t know
how to advance.
But you know that
you’ll wake up tomorrow
knowing that you’d rather wake.
And it’s then that you snap
up the peas from the box
and head out the back
to check out.
Alice Murray is a young poet living in North London. She graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2020 and is currently studying for an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.