I.
 
At the CVS on Riverside Drive, the employees greet me with a cheery hello as I
            make my way through automatic doors.
 
Just as their faces have become familiar, I’d like to think that they sort of know who I am, 
            too, that they may recognize me as that woman who smiles warm, 
            reciprocates wishes for a morning good.

II.
 
I scan the endless rows of shelves, shelves stacked full, bottles, jars, jugs plastic, 
            boxes, hairbrushes, tubes, creams, no spaces in between. 
 
It makes me think that this here Consumer Value Store, a neighborhood pharmacy 
            is an armory, a distribution center. 

Dedicated to the procurement of products willing the body’s refinement.
 
III.
 
I’m in search of the latest thing I’ve heard, the oddity of it reminds me of when I was eight
            or nine, having just learned
 
the early conquistadores, grown men who sailed ships from Puerto Rico to
            Florida in search of youth’s fountain.
 
I too, want to try this potion Baby’s Foot; they say it restores rough and callused
            foot bottoms to the velvety soft of a baby’s hind.
 
The promise of feet soft is the reward of purchase, guaranteeing the peel, the 
            removal of callused skin tough, yellow, ugly, old.
   
IV.
 
You could say vanity motivates this search, but the task of the pedicure is twofold.

It’s the transformation of extensions to the loveliest and prettiest of toes, polished
            so neat, so clean, it inspires the toasting of champagne flutes.
 
Yet the heft of paid bodywork is awkward, makes me feel more awkward within 
            myself as hands, not mine, hands as delicate as my immigrant 
            grandmother’s.
 
These hands scrub feet, trim cuticles, massage foot arches—it’s a performance of 
            intimacy similar (though not equivalent)
 
V.
 
When my mind tries to wrap itself around quantities sheer, like the yardage of 
            plastic reams needed to vacuum pack and freeze filets of fish fresh caught.
 
This type of whelming comes about when I find myself inside the ubiquitous box 
            top store, a building built without windows.
 
Such interiors dazzle with displays of blow-up Christmas Santa’s that hang from the 
            ceiling, and the flattest and thinnest of TVs, all the unnecessary 
            must-haves climb floor-to-ceiling.
 
I can’t fathom it all, just like brain tissues cannot delineate nor define the hordes 
            of humanity it cannot see. 

 
VI.
 
It’s this sense of the infinite that instills an impending doom, the way aerial photos 
           of riverbanks and estuaries of the Philippines are embedded in the plastics 
           of all things ours.
 
Bags of Bob’s Red Mill, plastic packaging for organic everything, chip bags, 
           hummus & yogurt containers, all the fancy water bottle drinks.
 
You see, plastic has been metastasizing since before my birth since Dustin
          Hoffman’s friend declared in The Graduate that 'plastic' was America's 
          future.

All the plastic cases, cups, caps, bottles & tops have been collecting, an 
          ever- growing continent of plastic particles amassed in the whirl of the 
          South Pacific's gyre.
 
Like the beluga whale, with its suction, a swallow of ocean water, gallons whole, and 
         the plastics that lodge within the whale’s inner cavity, pinching and pricking.
 
In a guise, my throat’s swallow now catches on the blue of the 
        plastic straw, the one I had surgically implanted within the soft of my 
        esophagus.

---

“Peanuts” by Daniel Nester