She graces a magazine cover in the Publix checkout line & I catch Elvis’s sneer from a rag in a rack next to Marilyn 47 years after he died & this aisle is a cornucopia of diet secrets of the stars, thyroid miracle cures & tabloids screaming headlines about red aliens secretly keeping Trump alive while rival blue aliens keep Biden alive & I wonder if Elvis & Marilyn flirt when the store closes & the lights go down, whether tabloid Trump & tabloid Biden sneak cold ones from the refrigerated aisle & laugh when Trump tells Biden convictions are great publicity but he gets mad when he asks Biden why did you fuck me like this, Joe, why did you drop out & stick me up against that Asian woman who suddenly became black & now I’m wondering if the same alien photographer snapped enough images of Elvis & Marilyn to keep the grocery media fed until 2062 & does Elvis ask one of the late night stock clerks to fix him a peanut butter & banana sandwich & does he croon “Are You Lonesome Tonight” to Marilyn or if TMZ is recording our every move but the high school kid in the green polo scanning my groceries doesn’t know that I’m thinking about any of this, nor is he concerned that I’m paying three dollars more for the same tin of McDonalds coffee than I did this time last year as he drags the items across the belt & his eyes gaze at the cashier in the next line just like Elvis & Marilyn look at each other from mag to mag & Marilyn has been dead longer than I’ve been alive & Elvis died before my bar mitzvah & the bag boy plops my items into environmentally unfriendly plastic bags because I always forget the reusable ones in my trunk.
IsabelGaspar