More Stranger
“Supplicant” by Maureen Alsop, PhD
The Walgreens cashier suggests maybe we—humans—weren’t meant to evolve on this planet. She’s ringing up my ibuprofen, my lidocaine back patches, my heating pad. There’s a theory, she says, that we were dropped here from a world where the gravity wasn’t so hard on our spines. Where the sun didn’t burn our skin. Where we didn’t get flooded out of our homes, or frozen during a night outside, where no bugs bit us with disease, plants didn’t make us itch. We swam in warm lakes, ran barefoot, ate fruit from the trees just outside our sliding doors. She says: we stood tall and comfortable and lifted a person we loved and spun them, kissed them, fell gently onto grass like helicopters from a sugar maple, like balloons, without weight or pain, held safe by an atmosphere where our bodies felt good and right and well and easy and nothing. Walgreens never evolved on that planet, since there was no need for sunscreen, insoles, antacids, bug spray, vitamins, ice packs, fiber supplements, eye drops, allergy meds, bandaids, steroid creams, antifungals, cough syrup, vicks, antihistamines, opioids.
Why on earth did we leave.
Walgreens lady can tell I’m estranged from my body, that I’m confused that this is how I feel. She is old, and her back rounds down, she moves slowly herself, works. I fall in love with her, the only person I believe understands my sudden abandonment into a world that feels wrong. I imagine us lifted into the air of our home planet, where we are buoyant, cheery, loose and light. Where the physics lets us float and fly, like even very large birds, unfathomably heavy airplanes, paper ships on city ponds, brown thrashers mating, severed feet in shoes on Alaskan beaches, smoke, sleeping otters, immense glaciers, apples in a barrel, thistledown. I hold her hand and we bob in a kinder space without wallets. Here on earth, only a few miles from this Walgreens where the pharmacist, unfortunately, knows me on sight, a whole cruise ship stays afloat on Lake Superior, full with people taking selfies while the wonder of earth’s rocks and trees—this possibly adopted, heavy world—shines solid behind their backs.
About the author
Jennifer A. Howard teaches creative writing and edits Passages North in Michigan’s snowy Upper Peninsula.
about the artist
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Tender to Empress; Pyre; Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren (also a Spanish Edition, Reyezuelo Aparición, translated by Mario Domínguez Parra); and several chapbooks including Sweetwater Ardour; Nightingale Habit; and the dream and the dream you spoke. She is the winner of the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry, The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award, among others. Her poetry was recently shortlisted for Montreal International Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Laurel Review, AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, DIAGRAM, Action Yes, Drunken Boat, Memorious, The Kenyon Review, Typo Magazine and featured on Verse Daily. She has a debut short story forthcoming with South Dakota Review. Her translations of the poetry of Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay, 1892-1979) and Mario Domínguez Parra are available through Poetry Salzburg Review. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn. She is a Book Review Editor and Associate Poetry Editor at Poemeleon. She holds a MFA from Vermont College.