Tag: mall

Orientation by Jacob Butlett

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Orientation

During my first week as a sales associate
at the Kennedy Mall, the assistant manager,
a white woman in a tight black blouse,
told me in a low voice, I’m not racist,
but many of the customers who steal
from us are Black, so keep that in mind.
I was speechless. Behind me, lava lamps
glowed bright red, as if blood were oozing
in their cylindrical prisons. I was seventeen.
A closeted white boy from Iowa. My high school
teachers warned me about casual racism—how it
can come across as benign but is really evil.
I looked at my assistant manager as she hurried off
to ring up a customer, & I wondered whether
my co-worker was evil for saying such a thing.
I stood stock-still by the lava lamps, not knowing
whether to be offended, glancing at the luminous
blobs drooping again & again. I felt like that,
melting from the inside out, burning hot.

*

Jacob Butlett has an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He teaches first-year composition at Minnesota State University, Mankato, and works as the Head Poetry Editor at Blue Earth Review. Jacob’s creative works have been published in many journals, including Colorado Review, The Hollins Critic, Crab Orchard Review, and Lunch Ticket. Jacob received an Honorable Mention for the Academy of American Poets Prize (Graduate Prize). He is the author of the poetry book Stars Burning Night’s Quiet Rhapsody (Kelsay Books, 2024).

Two Poems by Grant Clauser

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To the Carol Singer at the End of the Anthropocene Mall

A week until Christmas and the mall mostly
ghost town, one Macy’s still struggles
on like a steam engine against new highways.
Even the store manager buys his gifts online.
I stop in the rotunda while my wife browses
past empty boutiques. Teenagers searching
for irony pose for photos with a jaundiced Santa.
On the small stage, a lone singer with piano
pokes through an app for carols she knows,
settles on White Christmas, then slides into
I’ll Be Home… while an audience of three
stare into our phones or Starbucks cups.
We’re all a mess of distraction and regret.
And how can we not be? The season trying hard
to cheer us into a new year. Signs for lease
and loss all around. Trauma so common
it becomes a kind of faith. She sings like she knows
none of this. She sings like an evening campfire,
like snow over a plowed field, like a table
set for the whole family. She sings
as they say, her heart out, which takes
all her strength to carry home.

*

The Last Christmas

Eventually the weather turns
on all of us, and then
you find yourself in a forest
without recognizing the trail.
Every tree older or broken by winter.
Loved ones gone or going
dawn by dawn.

It’s harder now to get back.
Children grown, and the days
imitate water flowing over falls.
We say that creaking in the foundation
is ground settling and not decay
in the heart’s bedrock

breaking apart.

*

Grant Clauser’s sixth poetry book is Temporary Shelters from Cornerstone Press. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Kenyon Review and other journals. He’s an editor for a news media company and teaches poetry at Rosemont College in Pennsylvania.