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unyielding triangle. Sad girl with a styrofoam head. Sad girl with nostalgia. We leave our attachments in a landscape (deeply felt, uneventful). The eternal city is not the hereafter but a cheap plastic copy with a crocheted ocean wrapped in blandness and littered with shiny cars. My grandmother’s styrofoam head ripples with laughter and confusion, my grandmother in her white sun hat, her white turban, the ever more ancient man she hired annually in his white captain’s hat to pick my sister and I up from the Fort Lauderdale airport in his Lincoln Continental. The one time I tried to drive myself in a rental I got so lost I had to stop at the Lucky Boy Motel for directions. It was night. There was bulletproof glass and the Vacancy signs lining US-1 shined pink, turquoise, the colors most opposite of ice. Her eyeless head, her head that would float on the Intracoastal, bob like a buoy then get swept out to sea, that won’t nod anymore as if she were listening to us complain about the sun, the heat, “Feliz Navidad” playing on the slow drive from the airport each December, our faces tilted to the windshield.

W AL M ART S UPERCENTER

    God Bless America says the bumper sticker on the racer-red
    Rascal scooter that accidentally cuts me off in the Walmart parking lot
    after a guy in a tricked-out jeep with rims like chrome pinwheels tries
    to pick me up by honking, all before I make it past the automatic doors
    waiting to accept my unwashed hair, my flip-flops, my lounge pants.

    The old man on the scooter waves, sports a straw boater banded in blue & white,
    and may or may not be the official greeter, but everyone here sure is friendly—
    even the faces of plastic bags, which wink yellow and crinkle with kindness,
    sound like applause when they brush the legs of shoppers carrying them
    to their cars. In Port Charlotte, a woman’s body was found in a Jetta

    in a Walmart parking lot. In a Walmart parking lot in Springfield,
    a macaque monkey named Charlie attacked an eight-year-old girl.
    I am a Walmart shopper, a tract-house dweller—the developments
    you can see clearly from every highway in America that’s not jammed up
    on farmland or pinned in by mountains. I park my car at a slant in the lot,

    hugged tight by my neighbors’ pickups. I drive my enormous cart
    through the aisles and fill it with Pampers, tube socks, juice boxes, fruit.
    In the parking lot of the McAllen Walmart, a woman tried to sell six
    Bengal tiger cubs to a group of Mexican day laborers. A man carjacked
    a woman in the parking lot of the West Mifflin Walmart, then ran

    under a bridge and disappeared. Which is to say that the world
    we expect to see looks hewn from wood, is maybe two lanes wide,
    has readily identifiable produce, and the one we’ve got has jackknifed itself
    on the side of the interstate and keeps skidding. The one we’ve got has clouds
    traveling so fast across the sky it’s like they’re tied to an electric current.

    But electricity is the same for everybody. It comes in the top of your head
    and goes out your shoes, which will walk through these automatic doors.
    In the Corbin Walmart parking lot a woman with a small amount of cash
    was arrested for getting in and out of trucks. A man stepped out of his car
    in the Columbus Walmart parking lot, and shot himself. I get in the checkout line

    behind a lighted number on a pole. The man in front of me jangles coins
    in his pocket, rocks back and forth on his heels. The girl in front of him
    carefully peels four moist dimes from her palm to pay for a small container
    of honey-mustard dipping sauce. In the parking lot of the LaFayette Walmart,
    grandparents left their disabled two-year-old grandson sitting in a shopping cart

    and drove away. Employees in the parking lot at the La Grange Walmart
    found a box containing seven abandoned kittens. I am not a Christian or
    prone to idioms, but when the cashier says she is grateful for