The Checkout Guy at the Co-Op
by Alice Duggan
her name still listed a long-time member I get her discount.
His jokes are poised at appropriate distance,
he might be flirting or could this be a kind of gallantry.
Outside in the dark it’s raining hard
my mother begs for her life to end.
I lift my little bag of groceries.
Alice Duggan
Poems by Alice Duggan have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry East, WaterStone Review, Sleet Magazine and elsewhere; also in her chapbook, A Brittle Thing (Green Fuse Poetic Arts, Loveland, Colorado, 2012). She has poems in three anthologies: The Heart of All That Is, 2013, (Holy Cow! Press), Resist Much Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2017), and Rocked by the Waters (Nodin Press, 2020). As a writer, she’s interested in dailiness, in plain speech, in sound, the timbre of voices. In telling stories.