Aaron Guile
A Response to Classical Theology
or The Bats Live Above the Deli Department
Aisle six is just cans and it has
always been just cans. Brian works
near the canned tuna, scanning labels.
He’s dressed in all white under his
blue vest and speaks slowly,
deliberately through flashing teeth
to his telxon, occasionally aiming it.
Thank you, he says. The printer on his hip
grinds out clearance tags. Maria tray
cuts canned cream corn (I need a label,
Brian) with her jeweled red, box
cutter. She dresses in grey. No one sees her.
Customers enter their aisle from meat
or from bras & shapewear
not all their children are crying,
yet: candy and cereal aisles are deeper
further in. Close to dairy and the beer,
but, no one seems to
leave aisle six. Carts worm around
through space-time and flickering lights.
I watch from in front of the pears and
not getting cell-phone coverage
I look up to see if there is a
signal repeater in the rafters
and hear the finches, the redpolls,
living in the light fixtures above
the produce department gossip about the
change-room attendant and the cart-
pusher’s lunch date.
About the writer:
Aaron Guile lives in Provo, Utah, on the eastern rim of the Great Basin Desert under the Wasatch Mountains’ shadows. Like most Americans, he worked at several companies, picking up sprinklings of life insights from co-workers. After graduating from Utah Vally University, he studied poetry at Florida Atlantic University. Aaron Guile’s work has appeared in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Fire in the Pasture, and Touchstones: A Magazine of Literature and Art.
Image: Loss of Memory by Rant 73 (contemporary). Digital art. No technical information specified. 2021. Public domain.
