ORLANDO GOES SHOPPING AT TARGET

by Susan Cossette

CLAIM: Target’s Pride collection features a bathing suit for kids that is labeled “tuck-friendly.”
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The “tuck-friendly” swimsuits are only offered in adult sizes, according to a spokesperson for the company and Target’s website. Kids’ swimsuits in the collection do not feature this label.

He was young, rich, handsome.
 
Exiled from court,
robbed of his coronet
and robes of the garter,
he left the rancid nodding mass 
of stiff lace and ceremony—
the Lady Purity, 
the Lady Modesty, 
the Lady Chastity,
terrifying diadems of lightning and ice.
 
There was no truth in their dreadful den.
Avant. Begone.
 
While Orlando slept
the scarlet trumpeters circled and blared 
TRUTH
 
and she awoke naked, unashamed
in the dressing room of the Nicollet Mall Target
among scattered plastic hangers 
and clothing of every color cast
on common grey carpet.
 
With the money left from
the sale of her pearls
she procured vivid dresses, paper fans,
butterfly socks, even a tuck suit.
 
Ecstasy, ecstasy, 
wild plumed goose loading rainbows
into a red plastic cart,
on her way to the self-serve checkout.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.  

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