Poetz celebrates BUY NOTHING DAY

photo: Rochelle Ratner
click for larger image

DEPARTMENT STORE

by Karin de Weille

Stuff. Everywhere—draping the racks and sprawled on tables,

covering shelves and crowding cubby holes, scattered beneath glass and between partitions, walls facing every which way in a crazy land that turned me

round and round—I thought I’d entered a pinwheel. There was a thing I wanted to buy.

A chopper-slicer-splitter-dicer and I started to think

about the factory where it’d been built, where the workers come in

twenty-four hours a day in separate shifts and the factories

where the workers built the machines to go into the factory,

as well as the miners who got the iron to make the steel to go into the machines.

I started thinking about all the stores that had been built to display

this chopper-slicer-splitter-dicer, the people who worked to build the stores,

and the people who came there every day for six months or more

before sliding the thing out of its glass case and

showing it to me.

Then there were the people who carried it to the store,

and the trucks they drove not just to carry the gadget (I slid my card across the glass)

but to carry the plastic for the little buttons on the back,

to carry the glass in the display counters,

to carry the bellowing cows whose hides were needed

for the gloves which the workers wore for a couple of weeks before they needed

a new pair.

And then the people who made the trucks to do all that carrying,

and the oil they used to drive them,

and the people who worked to build the pipelines to transport the oil,

and the people cleaning up the mess produced by the trucks and

the factories and the steel plants and the paper plants and the plastic plants,

putting the mess on barges and the barges moving it up and down the coast because

only the gulls will pick at it.

And the people repairing the roads crushed by the trucks

and the asphalt they poured and the factories across the world where they’re busy stirring that black gooey stuff,

and the people who push around the papers and make the calls and fly

back and forth across the country and across the world to organize

the building and the selling and the funding through the stockmarket and

the oil their planes guzzle

and the troops they send to protect the oil

and the people who follow the troops to sing and dance and keep up their spirits,

and the oil the planes guzzle and spew carrying these people and their instruments and bright frilly costumes, red-white-and-blue.

Then I thought I’d thought enough

and I pushed back out,

swinging a bag by its straps.