Costco opens at ten. We get one hour to shop before then.
Eight a.m., everyone starts lining up.
First-responders go to one line, seniors to the other.
The two lines face each other and wrap around the building as we wait.
 
A policewoman behind me is on her first day off out of three.
She hopes to find Clorox wipes for her cruiser’s computer keyboard.
Before COVID, other cops made fun of her for being such a neatsie nut.
Now they all ask her for wipes.
She says she’ll come back every day she’s off until the gets them.
She worked four 12-hour days in a row—her usual work week, she says.
Her eyes droop like she could sleep a week.
 
A pharmacist from Kaiser Permanente’s here for Lysol spray.
He’s networking with his co-workers, each at a different Costco.
He’s been here every day for the last three weeks.
He asks why I didn’t make it yesterday.
I tell him something came up.
I don’t tell him my client had a severe asthma attack and could barely move.
I don’t tell him my client was terrified of the hospital and didn’t want to go there.
 
A nurse arrives from the hospital.
Her light purple scrubs are rumpled.
Her blonde hair is pulled into a scruffy ponytail.
She is here after the end of her shift.
Her body tries to sag from exhaustion but she forces herself to stand straight.
She needs toilet paper and Clorox wipes.
 
The seniors outnumber us. Their line keeps growing.
A couple of them say they’re upset first-responders go in before they do.
None of the first-responders respond.
Responding means reliving details and none of us want to go there.

after John Ashbery
 
I steer clear of my brother’s mania while I shop at the market.
Even if it’s the same malady, amped all the way to superhuman—
like Superman pulling me along when he leaps tall buildings, up, 
 
up and away—there are times I fear to claim the disease as mine,
like my brother will manifest next to me, solid as a linebacker,
drag me to the butcher case, get tomahawk steaks to throw
 
as though they were wood and steel, not beef, just to see how well
they stick into a wall. The dread, after 20 years of not seeing him,
is an air-conditioning chill that shadows me past Spam and chili,
 
while a homeless man wheels a mark-down cart from the back,
enough bottled water inside to float any number of political agendas.
Asylum’s on sale in the breakfast aisle; buy three or I don’t qualify,
 
either for freedom or the looney-bin. Asylum’s Vincent Van Gogh,
as he painted himself, when he copied Gustave Doré’s prison yard,
blue and tan brick walls on his canvas. From the prisoners’ circle,
 
Van Gogh glares—a relentless, fierce look that crushes the viewer 
like dried rosemary in a mortar. I know that grinding glower well:
asylum at full price, pay as I go, take all my pills or the bill’s steep.
 
While a checker and I watch, the mark-down cart makes another pass.