Courtney Hinson

Charms of the Anthropocene III

A backslash that divvies love from hate in an employee handbook. Embroidered cross-stitches of a vintage computer game’s covered wagon. How a sky’s blue dissipates like an exhale of relief. Whole Foods sign in the fish market that reads “Consciously Caught.” California fire-funnels. The intravenous exhaustion that seeps into your thumbs after hours of doomscrolling. Learning that candy cigarettes were, in fact, never banned. Instagram’s conveyer belt of designer realities. The Mountain Dew regrets that beckon from my front teeth’s transparent enamel. A cashier’s non-greeting. My pink socks slowly losing their circles of rubber tread via excessive, indoor pacing. Cookies prized for their flavor that mimics cereal-milk intended to taste like fake variants of fruits. A loneliness—initially amorphous—that hardens into regular Netflix binges. The video’d stampede of Black Friday shoppers in their shared pursuit of a discounted waffle maker. Feeding cat-treats to pigeons from a train platform. 

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The Silver Moon Swap
 
On a Saturday in June, Florida unleashes fidgety packs of heat ready to unfold this day into lop-sided sunburns and wilting grins. But, as the temp rises, origamis of southern charm fade back to sellers’ creased faces. Admittedly, the aisles gift a feel-good kitsch: home-phone of lips that part with each call, a necklace punctuated with a tiny, pewter gas pump, two shower-drains repurposed to a cheese grater. 
 
And then there’s an oil-painting of Atlas, upholding earth, rote as a dung-beetle hoisting his dung. A virtuous Bro, his silly, segmented abs like balloons—the sort clowns craft to poodles—brace with the world’s weight. The portrait’s hollowed pigments evidence a sun, goaded to overstep its bounds. To sear the light from every hue, even the orb Atlas touts. His earth, melting to a scoop of Super Man, a prismatic deluge of consequences. 
 
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Costco

Each visit, an unsolved riddle. A nameless gut knowledge. Start with the gun-safes lined, at attention, near the entrance. Their five-pronged handles, obedient as watermills to an unseasonal thaw. The sparkle of an engagement ring intercepts your sightline with its natural diamond. But the word natural is like the word freedom, i.e. it sports an adjustable collar and leash manned by an agenda, ready to bag-up bullshit. Is domestication anything but a grammar to justify? To rationalize concessions with $1.50 hotdogs only feet from the pet section with a $350 bed? Or the landscaping aisle’s $400 polyresin Budda? There’s a freedom here, especially tangible, in your chosen vacuum (the red; not the blue) and selected tortilla chips (salted; not unsalted). Ladies “medium” shirts are two-person tents and this makes me think of American souls without homes. Quantities of food or shampoo forfeit value with volume, everything abiding the market’s natural laws. 

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Metaphors for a Kite in a Tree

As if God’s eyepatch. As if a mangroves map and its indicated destination. As if a tumor uncoiling among dendritic nerves. As if the wind gave up. As if a child’s ghost outfitted in dayglo. As if an exasperated squid snarled in coral. As if an irreverent gadfly resenting bureaucracy. As if a dead waitress dropped her purgatory-issued blanket. As if the voice of your unborn tangled in static. As if the carcass of a volleyball. As if the wad of Bubbleyum tangled in my kindergarten ponytail. As if an unabashed faux pas among snoots. As if a meditating camper disembarked from his body, but not his tent. 

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Regarding Cheese

for Ryan

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
G.K. Chesterton

Balls of mozzarella stuffed with flavour like eyes that’ve seen too much. Doorstops of brie. Feta, self-destructive as my ex who failed to visit his dying father. The cheese-dust of chips congealed in my husband’s drumming fingernails Shredded cheese like piles of claymation characters’ eyebrows. A slab of habanero like a red pepper soap. A soft chevre, malleable enough to sculpt, as if domesticating a fox. Melted cheese on tortilla chips like a tsunami over roof shingles. How the rank aroma of bleu cheese has the swagger of a CFO. And ricotta-loving Ryan challenging a poet to translate cheese into equations, solvable only by prose.
 
Courtney Hinson