Pharmacy

Her questions reek like the bottom

of a stale coffee jar.

Is this for yourself?

She meets my eye, yawning,

hair bright as a bowlful of lemons

and tells me to take a seat

with the others, faces blank as planets

and waiting like hungry children,

soothed by candy-bright capsules

that will heal us quicker than Christ.

A handful to settle her nervous tic

and her husband, wrapped at home

in a makeshift deathbed

gorges on daytime TV—

not water to wine

but veins plump with numbing miracles,

big words, serotonin—

his grey and mushroomed brain.

A tear pearls on his nose.

He rattles his pills like a baby,

wails for something to drink.

Rain blisters and bursts on the door.

A name is tossed like a sandwich-crust

as I wait my turn, eye the cool blink

of glass bottles, elixirs,

bored pharmacists

diamond-mining the shelves

for the perfect cure

to rock me to sleep at long blue last

on the train slipping down through my spine.