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A Featured Series of Close Readings
PROCEDURAL DREAD:
the Via Dolorosa of the Checkout Line
A Close Reading of “I Misplace My Humanity at the Grocery Store”
a poem by Samantha Padgett
Click HERE to read the poem “I Misplace My Humanity at the Grocery Store.”
Click HERE to read an alternative interpretation.
Click HERE to download this PDF pamphlet.
In “I Misplace My Humanity at the Grocery Store,” Samantha Padgett transforms an ordinary errand into a site of existential and cultural reckoning. By filtering the speaker’s grocery store experience through memories of childhood lockdown drills, Catholic ritual, and the omnipresent threat of gun violence, the poem reveals how fear has become embedded in the routines of American life. Padgett collapses distinctions between the sacred and the mundane, the past and the present, showing how repeated exposure to violence—real or anticipated—reshapes perception long before catastrophe occurs. What emerges is not a moment of panic, but a portrait of quiet normalization: a speaker who moves through daily rituals already rehearsed for harm. Through its fragmented form and unsettling metaphors, the poem argues that humanity is not lost in moments of spectacle but slowly eroded by the procedures that teach individuals to expect violence as ordinary.
The poem opens with an image of distracted, almost childish transgression: the speaker peels stickers from apples and hides them “under my tongue,” likening the act to forbidden gum from school (lines 1–4). This image establishes several of the poem’s governing tensions. The grocery store—a site of abundance, routine, and consumer choice—becomes a space of secrecy and bodily concealment. The speaker’s comparison to childhood discipline introduces an undercurrent of surveillance and punishment, suggesting that even trivial actions are experienced through an internalized logic of regulation. The title’s phrasing, “misplace my humanity,” reinforces this dynamic: humanity is not violently taken but casually lost, as though amid errands and habits one might simply forget where it was last held.
Padgett quickly deepens this unease by layering religious memory into the speaker’s present consciousness. Identifying as a “lapsed cradle catholic,” the speaker recalls stained glass, confessionals, and mass in the same breath as “mass shootings” (lines 5–9). The syntactic compression of these images collapses sacred ritual and public violence into a single mental register. Significantly, the speaker follows this list with the flat assertion, “I’m not sad” (line 10). Rather than signaling emotional stability, this declaration suggests numbness—a practiced affect shaped by repeated exposure to fear. The poem implies that emotional restraint itself has become a survival mechanism.
The poem then shifts into a childhood memory that crystallizes this conditioning. At twelve years old, the speaker stands “lined up against a chainlink fence with the other P.E. girls” during what adults insist is merely a drill (lines 11–13). Yet one girl’s repeated claim—“They’re lining us up for execution” (line 15)—introduces a destabilizing possibility the poem never fully disavows. The speaker’s later qualification, “And maybe they are / were” (lines 16–17), preserves the ambiguity between rehearsal and reality. Padgett does not argue that the child’s fear is factually correct; instead, she exposes how plausible it feels within a culture saturated by gun violence. The drill itself becomes traumatic, training children not only to respond to danger but to imagine their own deaths with eerie specificity.
Formally, the poem mirrors this psychological fragmentation. Written in free verse with irregular spacing and heavy enjambment, the poem resists linear narration. Thoughts interrupt one another, sentences fracture across lines, and white space opens unexpectedly within phrases, visually enacting the way intrusive memories surface without warning. The rhythm remains conversational but unstable, oscillating between narrative clarity and associative drift. This instability reflects a mind that cannot remain fully present in the grocery store nor fully confined to the past; instead, it moves compulsively among temporal states, governed by anticipation rather than chronology.
One of the poem’s most revealing transitions occurs when the speaker recalls their former ease with texting on a Motorola phone, boasting that they “didn’t need my eyes swear to god” (lines 19–20). The tactile description of the thumb “jackhammering the buttons” conveys speed, competence, and bodily mastery (line 22). For a moment, the speaker occupies a memory of agency and skill. Yet even this confidence is quickly subsumed into the poem’s governing metaphor. The phrase “when they did line us up for execution / which is to say” (lines 24–25) reframes both past and present as iterations of the same ritualized vulnerability. The conditional becomes habitual; execution is no longer hypothetical but procedural.
This logic reaches its most explicit articulation when the speaker equates childhood drills with the adult self‑checkout line: “when they do line us up at the self‑checkout” (line 26). The mundane choreography of consumer culture—waiting, scanning, standing silently—becomes indistinguishable from enforced compliance under threat. The apples, stripped of their stickers, are rendered “naked” and likened to “collarless dogs” (lines 27–28), an image that fuses domestication with exposure. The speaker imagines themselves “dead‑ / ly quiet” (lines 29–30), a phrase that collapses obedience and mortality into a single posture. Silence here is not reverence but a learned strategy for survival.
Religious imagery intensifies the poem’s critique of ritualized violence. The speaker envisions themselves standing quietly “as the Father blesses my forehead” (line 31), invoking the familiar Catholic gesture of benediction. Yet the blessing is delivered “with the gun’s panting mouth” (line 32), a metaphor that grotesquely personifies the weapon and installs it as a perverse replacement for divine authority. The gun is animate, intimate, and invasive, collapsing the distance between sacred touch and lethal force. In the poem’s final lines, the speaker declares, “Of course, I’ll accept this communion — / I’ve been waiting for it” (lines 33–34). Communion, traditionally a ritual of spiritual nourishment and communal belonging, is reimagined as execution. Acceptance here does not signify faith but exhaustion; the speaker submits not because they believe, but because they have been conditioned to expect nothing else.
By the poem’s conclusion, fear has become so habitual that it no longer registers as panic. This normalization is the poem’s most unsettling achievement. The speaker does not resist or protest; they wait, comply, and accept. What is ultimately misplaced is not only innocence but the capacity to imagine a life unstructured by threat. Padgett’s poem suggests that the true loss of humanity occurs not in moments of spectacular violence, but in the quiet repetition of rituals that train bodies to anticipate harm as ordinary.
Ultimately, “I Misplace My Humanity at the Grocery Store,” exposes how violence in American life is not merely episodic but procedural. By weaving together childhood memory, consumer routine, and Catholic sacrament, Padgett reveals a culture in which execution has been absorbed into daily practice, rehearsed until it feels inevitable. The poem leaves the reader not with shock, but with recognition—and with the disturbing realization that such recognition may itself be the most profound evidence of what has already been lost.
ABOUT SAMANTHA PADGETT:
Samantha Padgett holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing from Sam Houston State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Fourteen Hills, Salt Hill Journal, Pinch, North American Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, Texas, with her partner and their cats.
Image: Down at the Jitney Jungle (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
This project was made possible, in part, through support from
Richard Stimac and his new book BLOOD, WATER, AND STONE
available now from Spartan Press.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
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