Confluence, or every time I google a beautiful word to check for meaning, it comes up as the name of a tech company

In some US states, it’s easier to buy a tiger
than adopt a rescue dog. The morning has just begun

and already I am furious, then empty, then bereft.
One more item added to the resistance list.

I join the queue, salve emotion with an oat milk latte.
In the coffee shop, a middle-aged businesswoman conducts

conversations in A VERY LOUD VOICE. She wants the follow-up
followed up. She up-buttons her jealousies. I won’t be her mirror.

On either side of darkness hours, I work for a photocopier
company, and churn through meetings searching for the way

forward: sell the solution rather than the box. Without irony,
we create presentations, manuals and reports,

millions of words, how one inspires the company’s
income future, the other always faces the past.

Next year, this will exist only as a memory unique to me.
Fiction is one way to tell the truth. I place myself inside

the flow of commuter bodies and chase ephemeral things.
We give them different names: hearts, followers, clout,

happiness and cycle through Valencia, Juno and Lark.
We have searched for the real place ever since.

After I return with the groceries, the pink contrails
have disappeared from the sky. The light travelled so far,

I thought it would stay with me forever. Time like a rustle of silk,
spread taut but imperfect, inching from indigo to black.

---

SK Grout grew up in Aotearoa/New Zealand, has lived in Germany, and now splits her time as best she can between London and Auckland. She is the author of the micro chapbook to be female is to be interrogated (the poetry annals, 2018). She holds a post-graduate degree in creative writing from City, University of London and is a Feedback Editor for Tinderbox Poetry. Her work also appears in Crannóg, Landfall, trampset, Banshee Lit, Parentheses Journal, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. See more at https://skgroutpoetry.wixsite.com/poetry.