Grandpa Mack’s Grocery Store by Sharon Waller Knutson

sits smack dab
in the middle
of spud fields
on a highway,
a mile from town,
with a creek out back.

His wife runs off
with the freezer
salesman, his kids
grow up and leave,
and he marries
my grandmother.

Still sunrise to sunset,
snow or sunshine,
he sells bread
and baloney
to locals, sodas
and fudgsicles

to traveling tourists
and barters
with farmers
for fresh produce
and eggs. He still
refuses to close

after the freeway
bypasses the store
and chemo weakens him.
When he is gone,
my grandmother
sells the building,

which becomes a bar
where locals swig beer
from a tap and now a barn
housing horses that drink water
from the creek out back.



Sharon Waller Knutson, a retired journalist, writes poetry from her Arizona desert home. Her work has appeared in The Orange Room Review, Literary Mama, Verse-Virtual, Wild Goose Poetry Review and Your Daily Poem. She is the author of five chapbooks: Dancing with a Scorpion, My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields, Desert Directions, They Affectionately Call Her a Dinosaur and I Did It Anyway.