Edeka
It is never busy in this supermarket: isomorphic
to a civic-square somewhere in the Urals,
ample host to a slight, calamitous revolution;
yet there’s but twenty shoppers here.
It smells of sewage, which seems to be accepted—
its workers indistinct, uniformed in jeans
and caretaker’s coat; hard to locate.
I walk the aisle without
close company, shamelessly brand-seeking
epigones of home. I could organise a meeting
in the corner by the sausages, plot with my reflection
in the butcher’s glass-mausoleum,
and not really be disturbed—perhaps form some
break-away republic beside that ziggurat of tinned
sauerkraut. I’d call it Martinberg: all its twenty citizens
could celebrate my beneficence, beneath a portrait by the tills.