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Set in a grocery story, Jordan Sanderson’s A Tailor Would Think Differently uses color and polysemy to equate the human body with edible and breakable things, finally ending on the lines

Even the weak-stomached kid with the mop
won’t think worse of you than he does of a sauce
that falls from the top shelf.

Presumably, this employee also will not be any more concerned for you than s/he would be for said jar. This makes sense given that the bleeding human body—your bleeding human body—is now being compared to a thing that is no longer edible because it has been broken. To be edible means to be eligible for a very specific sort of intimacy: to be able to be within another’s mouth, stomach, and bowels. Neither broken jar nor broken human possesses this eligibility any longer; lack of the possibility for intimacy reduces the possibility of empathy as well.

Coming to the grocery store then is the right thing for a broken human with a bleeding body to do not only because it is where Band Aids are or because there are objects to which one can be compared, but also because it is a place where one may interact with other people without intimacy. In the poem, an elderly woman at least wants to speak to you, though her willingness to cut in line may be seen as a way of avoiding have to stand too close to you for too long; a manager directs you “to canned / biscuits and recommend[s] a jar of strawberry / preserves”.

By contrast, if you went to a tailor, s/he would surely object, would think differently as the title says. It isn’t just that you would bleed over and stain the tailor’s fabrics, turning them to rags and bandages but that taking your measurements requires a degree of closeness which, again, the broken human body is deemed ineligible for.

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1. One-Poem Review: J Michael Wahlgren’s Mercury
2. One-Poem Review: Something Like an Asshole, or, How to Read the Rind
3. One-Poem Review: Mia Yun’s Brooklyn, First Spring
4. One-Poem Review: Kristine Ueyeda’s Penelope Instructs Her Husband on the Nature of the Sea
5. One-Poem Review: And After This by Sara Tracey
6. One Poem Review: Another Day Without Lin
7. One-Poem Review: Kim Addonizio’s For You
8. One Poem Review: quiet as it’s kept by Evie Shockley
9. One Poem Review: Last Surviving Pencil by Arlene Ang
10. One-Poem Review: If My Father Had Died by Kathleen Hellen

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