Back then it would have been 
Shop-Rite or Grand Union, 
the aisles filled with Wonder bread, 
Oreo cookies, Yoo-hoo, and 
Campbell’s soup. Seated in the cart, 
I could reach my mother’s waist. 
The supermarket made the announcement, 
on their rudimentary PA, normally used 
to tell the shoppers, Five minutes until closing, 
or On aisle six, Prince spaghetti on special, 
but this afternoon before my sister came home 
from school, President Kennedy was shot. 
President Kennedy is dead. 

	flagging attention the shape of pickles 

My mother’s lips began to tremble. 
Mine in unison. I reached 
for her hand—the first time 
I saw my mother cry. 

	in the pasta I taste my mother’s salt 

Publisher’s Note:

Shop-Rite stores were officially rebranded as Pathmark in 1968, almost five years after Kennedy’s assassination. In the 1970s, Pathmark was known for early adoption of 24-hour operations during the work week, and beginning in 1974, pioneered the use of computer scanners at checkouts. (Source: Grocery dot com, which includes profiles of numerous grocery retailers, brands, manufacturers, and suppliers worldwide.)

Carla Schwartz’s

poems appear in The Practicing Poet and in her collections: Signs of Marriage (Finishing Line Press, 2022); Mother, One More Thing (Turning Point, 2014); and Intimacy with the Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Recent and forthcoming curations include Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, Cider Press Review, contemporary haibun online, Drifting Sands Haibun, Eunoia Review, Euphony Journal, The MacGuffin, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Modern Haiku, New Verse Review, North Dakota Quarterly, ONE ART, Past Ten, Paterson Literary Review, Rattle, and Wales Haiku Journal.

Schwartz’s poem “Pat Schroeder Was Our Mother” won the 2023 New England Poetry Club E. E. Cummings Prize. And she received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in 2023.

Learn more at the poet’s website, which includes links to her poetry and performance videos: https://www.carlapoet.com/

See also the poet’s YouTube channel, which features documentary and how-to videos about her off-the-grid, solar-powered tiny houseboat: CB99Videos

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Chill Season by Carla Schwartz in Poets for Science: The Nature of Our Times (3 January 2025)

⚡ Musing Weather, an anomalous haibun by Schwartz in Issue 20.3 of contemporary haibun online (1 December 2024)

⚡ Contemplating Humanity While Swimming by Schwartz in Verse-Virtual (July 2024)

⚡ Two poems (“Saying Goodbye to My Father” and “Not Merely a Player on this World’s Stage”) in Verse-Virtual (September 2023)

⚡ Two poems (“Umbilical” and “How He Leaves”) in Issue 24 of The Ear (2021)