"I Love You, Rite Aid!" by Austin Beaton

And it’s not only the dollar aisle or because you gave birth control to a couple ex-girlfriends or how you fed me Lexapro, a pill Kanye West rapped about in a studio probably not far from a Rite Aid in Los Angeles. Not just that five bucks buys me and a millionaire the same serotonin droplets spreading under the part of the scalp soft on a baby, a chemical that tells me I’m me returning like a rabbit angel with a cartoon halo floating back into near-corpse Bugs Bunny so he can keep eating carrots and talk like he’s from New York, & I can enjoy the smell of gasoline, the beauty of an extra paper clip given by a colleague or finding beach rocks and agates shaped like Nebraska. It’s not only the reliability of my favorite cashier, a ketchup red vest like the fun aunt at Christmas or the palm tree parking lot, the oranges glowing out the black branches, magneting the light from your Pluto blue sign like something that’d happen between a moon and a star. It isn’t primarily the ice cream I never eat but glad is there for others like Christianity and Botox, or the bananas I don’t buy because I’m not sure I always want to be good to myself but would give it all away for a little familiarity. I could move to a new state, lose my mind or lover then visit any of the 4600 drug stores and the heels spin on the driveway back home from the mailbox, an anybody American boogie-ing down aisle 6 under bars of fluorescent, the industrial hum and same anxiety a pharmacy can soften. Rite Aid, I love you and a stranger also with your store membership is asking, what am I shopping for today? Who misses me? How much does it matter when I don’t trust myself? --------------------------------------- SUPPORT US ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/guidelines http://facebook.com/voicemailpoems http://twitter.com/voicemailpoems http://voicemailpoems.org/thepodcast