Evening Lists Inadequacies
unreels our slippages. My daughter kaleidoscopes
supermarket-aisles in the apartment lift
monotone. Squirrelling through the doorway, she pictures
what to; I don’t. Self- indulgence goads me
to pickles, pick up an unheard brand of garlic.
My daughter adores tomatoes (for her tomato sandwich
school snacks) weighed & slipped into pink paper. We have
cheese? My husband wavers between one & the value pack
of vim lemon bar. We refuse a refrigerator
of chocolate, a heftier pack of almonds, the possibility
of novel ingredients. Still we forget the grocery cloth-bag;
we split among us what’s bought to complete us.
My daughter hefts the pickle jar; we trade. I hold
the almonds beside. She carries her pasta sauce,
bingo mad angles, spaghetti like a house we’ll some day
build. He manages the organic jaggery, ragi vermicelli, toor dal,
250 g red label. I dread slipping as every time. Asking
for a second serving, she says she doesn’t like pickles yet.
Rahana K. Ismail is the author of the chapbook Newtness released by Yavanika Press in 2022. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in the Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English, Penn Review, Usawa Literary Review, POSIT, Alchemy Spoon, nether Quarterly, Contemporary Haibun Online, Aainanagar, Aleph Review, Chakkar, Alipore Post, Last Leaves, Io Literary Journal (Refractions), Paradoxlit, Farmer-ish, Stone of Madness, Foxglove, Hakara, Qissa, Verse of Silence, Pine Cone Review, among others.