Pandora's Collective Poetry Contest (2018)
2nd Place Winner - Teen Category

icebox
​

there is a grocery list in her back pocket,

it’s white and brittle and

her fingers fumble for

its familiar ashen touch in

the diffusive chill of aisle seventeen.

half-pound of chicken breast organic pecans cruciferous vegetables

it’s one of those mega-marts swirling dust

on an infertile thread of highway

west of cornfield and east of lonely,

the customers in their muddied pick-up trucks

looking for someplace to be, someplace to belong,

looking for someplace that never opens or shuts.

discount champagne rainbow sprinkles neon glow sticks

she doesn’t know how she ended up here, in the freezer aisle

alone, lips blue, ligaments

buried blue and lifeless in a stray icebox,

but still her

brined fingers smooth the pockets of a

pretty, smiling girl who burns a minute hole

in the crinkled seal of a reduced-fat

yogurt container, smiling

like her teeth are about to burst,

smiling like she just kissed the dentist

in his white coat.

bottle of moonshine whole wheat bread insulin needles

and tenderly she eases the airtight packaging

from its gentle perch, and peels open

the small, eroded cavity in her torso. the ribs are pared raw,

glisten harshly in the fluorescent lights, like disco balls and

bleached tile, as she lodges a kilogram

of weighted relief, of happy beginnings

and lily bunches on a baby’s grave,

of never quite knowing where you fit

or never quite knowing

where to go or who to turn to

when you are lost in perpetual lostness,

near the hollow space where a tepid heart

should swell.

numbing cream prescription lenses bloodstained shirt

a very tall man strolls past, clutching

a frayed bundle to his ruptured abdomen,

and she slips unnoticed to the

floor, harsh, blinding rubber

against a mile of skinned knee,

pretending to read the grocery list

her mother gave her

before she stole through the ajar window

late one feburary
​
and became a missing-persons case.


- ​Cate Freeborn