Disenfranchised

I went to the shop to ask whether they sold Aunt Betty’s Yorkshire puddings
that was shame enough having to tell a place with strip lighting and uniforms
about how the fat needs to be beef dripping not oil and needs to be so hot
it’s smoking in the tin the oven so hot it hot glues your eyelashes together
and how you yell don’t open the oven door to anyone who comes in the kitchen
except that you are not sure you even know those things. The man takes me along
to the frozen aisle and extracts a bag of vol-au-vents which he holds out
expecting me to accept them in the same way Meghan Markle accepted a posey
from the chosen child at the royal walkabout of the activity playground
and I say thanks and look a bit awkward trying to drift away towards safer ground
in the dairy aisle maybe, but he insists he says these are the frozen things
you put meat inside, and gravy, not sure about the peas. Or you could do
mushrooms and cream cheese if you wanted, or salmon. Strawberries and custard.
Isn’t that what you wanted? What you asked for? It is what you asked for
I don’t know what else you mean. He looks crushed and put out at the same time,
after all he had tried hard on my behalf and here I was declining what he knew I
needed

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Jilly O’Brien is a poet and psychologist from Ōtepoti Dunedin. She has had poems published in Landfall, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, Mayhem, takahē, Catalyst, The Spinoff, and 1964, as well as overseas in Cordite Poetry Review, Rabbit, Stand, The Blue Nib, and Not Very Quiet. In 2023 Jilly won the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Competition and in 2024 she was shortlisted for the Wigtown International Poetry Prize.