SHOPPING FOR A BLENDER

That day, I died of exposure, stuck in the tar
of the blacktop outside the department store
pinned in place by the stake of your criticisms,
scorched in shame as people passed, glancing.

When you were a boy in grade school
you took a magnifying glass on the playground.
Your friends cheered as you made the ants squirm
and burned caterpillars before they grew wings.

--Karen Crone, 1999

Posted in reply to OSI: Spectacle, placed here on the VTH in gratitude for such a place and for its loving manager, who sees our stories as sacred, and the art of telling them as spiritual--at times even healing. Thanks, Beth!