Lost in the Supermarket

_____I was walking down aisle four looking for the V8.

Coffee
Tea & Cocoa
Juice
Sports Drinks
Powdered Drinks

_____I swerved my cart around a gray woman who muttered, “All the weird things they’re doing to our juice,” resentment heavy in her voice like the aggrieved white people you hear muttering about immigrants and gays. Or is it black people and Jews? Juice. Posting manifestos in Facebook before – well, they used to call it “going postal,” but now maybe it’s more like going viral. I wonder what she meant.  What were “they” doing to “our” juice?  I plucked a spicy hot V8 from the shelf and put it in my cart, thinking, what had they done to our tomato juice?
_____Later, I caught up with the woman in the chilled foods section frowning at the cottage cheese selections while I snared a carton of orange juice from the cooler. No pulp. Not from concentrate. The look of dull anger in her eyes as she looked at the Chobani told me she was angry about what “they” were doing to “our” yogurt. Latte? Coconut? Heresy!

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Me and Sal Paradise, was published last year by FutureCycle Press. Two full-length collections are forthcoming in 2020, Catastroika, from Apprentice House, and Ugler Lee, from Kelsay Books.