Workshop it Out

I'm back in a workshop-style creative writing class. Advanced Creative Writing: Fiction & Poetry. I took Advanced Creative Writing: Poetry as a freshman with this very professor. She's tough as nails, and quite demanding, but I've put out good work under her tutelage so I'm psyched to start another semester with her. There are only seven other people in my class and I always find that smaller groups are more conducive to workshopping.

I'm posting my first workshop poem on here. Over Christmas break this year I spent a lot of days at the mall with my sister--usually I end up at the mall a maximum of four times a year. I think I went to the mall seven times in a matter of two weeks this December.

On one of these trips, I saw an elderly woman fall and hit her head in front of the cosmetics counter. She was with her daughter and her granddaughter. I don't actually know if she died or if she lived, but I wanted to write down what I saw because I can't get the image out of my head.


Christmas Shopping

I watched the old woman fall
against the trampled
marbled department store floor
in front of a dozen make-up artists,
who stirred to life like entranced mannequins.

The fragrance saleswomen rushed at her first,
angels on commission,
through a sinking overpriced haze
of floral spray.
It already smells like a funeral home.

I stood an aisle away
between racks of discounted Christmas sweaters,
the kind I give to my grandma,
who is the same age,
because I can't think of anything better, or maybe
I don’t know her at all.

Her face looks powdery and desolate,
a latex mask with eyes as wide and hollow,
a frozen front-porch grimace,
cracked lips,
parted.

Nobody heard her daughter scream for her
over the Muzak and the hard hurried footsteps
and because everything is unwittingly absorbed
in places like this.

I fear she died instantly upon falling.
That her brittle soul is mistakenly headed
for the garishly bright fluorescent light
of the cosmetics counter.
I want to scream
You're going the wrong way!
You're going the wrong way!

But instead I flee in fear
up the down escalator.