~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Maisie Kirn

At the Super Walmart in Slidell, LA

From the Homewood Inn and Suites,

in Slidell, Louisiana,

the South being a place I do not know,

and seek nothing from,

I walk to the Super Walmart,

and imagine a wolverine beside me—

patient and rough.

We walk the aisles,

moving only as the other moves,

through that imprecise and total power felt

late at night in quiet, too-bright stores.

What if the world ended,

and was empty,

save for me and this wolverine?

And, in step, we went alone

through the darkened Waffle Houses, reclaimant spiders,

and rust of things?

The bayou outside—

nothing I have seen before,

the Gulf there because it has to be,

a color I will learn.

Mostly, life is what is yet to come:

a wolverine beside you in the dark,

egrets, and

empty deodorant in the median—

all that is yet to be pulled down into meaning.

Maisie Kirn is a sometimes-writer and poet whose work is focused primarily on place, the changing West, and her girlhood. She was born and raised in Livingston, MT. Her poetry has appeared in Tuesday Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and Bodega Mag.