Ron Tobey

Childcare

Purple night of Kroger’s parking lot
8 o’clock
pale yellow flood light
two days post-Christmas
in my rusted Chevy Silverado
I listen to music on my iPhone
eleven scattered vehicles
SUVs gas-saving sedans
pickup trucks mud splattered
scattered around
moored to the asphalt
anchors of late work shifts.
Beams of Halogen headlights
slice across empty aisles
faintly painted parking stalls.
Through my front window I glimpse
a flash of face in an empty car
glint of glasses in a back seat
fifty feet from me.
My wife shops last-minute groceries
a half hour
women drift
motes jostled in the atmosphere
store to cars
pushing carts
heavy with bags thoughts
another flashbulb exposure
yellow curly hair
an image now of an older child
a nineteenth-century tintype
an infant in her lap
sprinkle of gold in the sand
sloshed in a miner’s pan.
An obese woman walks from the store
to the car’s back door
talks to the children laughs
then in a truck sits 100 feet distant
before returning to the market
a young woman in skinny jeans
unusual in our rural world
sits in her SUV
invisible in the cab’s dark
for ten minutes then leaves
to talk to the children
before she drives away.
They are watching me.

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Ron Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He has lived in Ithaca NY, Pittsburgh PA, Riverside CA, Berkeley CA, and London UK. He and his wife now live in West Virginia, where they raise cattle and keep goats and horses. He is an imagist poet, writing haiku, storytelling poems, spokenpoetry, and producing videopoetry. His work has appeared in several dozen literary magazines, including Truly U Review, Prometheus Dreaming, Broadkill Review, Cabinet of Heed, Punk Noir, Atticus Review - Mixed Media, and The Light Ekphrastic. His Twitter handle is @Turin54024117.