Bill Knott

Daily, in the supermarket where I go,
I gravitate to this one lane — the one
furthest there —you know: the busiest one.
Have I fallen in love with my checkout lane?

Well, I am male, I feel drawn to this aisle;
its openness is shameless, sexistly exciting;
the real way it squeezes my shopping cart
and deigns me to crowd in. Oh my checkout lane

has the longest wait of any — though unlike
the others in line I won’t leaf through the Liz
or Cher tabloids provided: none of them

is beautiful as what fills me as I enter
as I am queued up for the brief orgasm
as my cash is on the counter and I am free.

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Bill Knott’s poetry collections include The Naomi Poems, Book One: Corpse and Beans (1968), Becos (1983), Outremer, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize (1988), Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999 (2000), The Unsubscriber (2004), and others, including dozens of self-published volumes. A prolific painter as well as a long-time professor at Emerson College in Boston, Bill Knott’s eccentric demeanor as well as his gritty, brilliant work has garnered for him a passionate following of readers. He died in 2014. He spent his last years in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, not far from Carson City, Michigan, where he was born and where he is buried.

This poem is reprinted with permission of Robert Fanning, the Executor for the Estate of William Knott.