Crime and Desire

(c) 2010

“All human acts and all human creations constitute a single drama, and in this sense we are all saved or lost together.  Our life is essentially universal.”  Ponty

Dominique Hughes was picked up for shoplifting

by the Bon Marché security guards. 

This yellowed index card says he was nine years old. 

Another card stapled behind it —Dominique— age twelve,

weighing in at a slight 95 pounds, was caught peeking

into the women’s dressing room. 

All of us articulate want as legibly as we can.

I skip to another card, the one with my name, accomplice.

It shows I’m fourteen and is a lie.  I am tempted to rip it

like one does with paid tickets. Or at least scratch

and replace accomplice with observer.  After all,

when Shelbie snapped the rose-etched, leather bracelet

around her wrist I hissed, put it back, remembering

Glenda and I stopped and searched at J.C. Penny’s

just a month earlier for palmed lip gloss and dangly earrings.

I didn’t even have pierced ears. Those blue beads looked cold

as ice cream, like polished milk.  I was hungry with want,

but a want that yearned to receive more than this take.

Shelbie didn’t put the leather band back

so between tears, her mouth contorting like a hooked trout,

the security guards squeezed and bruised her upper arm.

Not one, yet, to challenge authority, on command

I lifted my shirt, shivering and self-conscious

as drafts in that gray concrete cellar hardened my nipples

into worthless currency.

I am momentarily surprised, but there it is,

the Bon Marche hired me to track and add

shoplifter’s names to that collection.

Thousands of cards, each documenting someone who,

for want, gripped some small watch,

or slipped a pair of shorts under their skirt, 

as though stealing is humanly natural.

I am not sure if I am here due to oversight,

or to the store manager’s act of charity.

And Dominique.  Three years later Dominique,

got sucked into a maelstrom of violence,

concealed a loaded gun and strutted into the Bon. 

Although, I’m adding strutted, who knows? 

The card descriptions are stark,

the handwritten scrawls fading. 

From where I sit any theory is possible.  Conspiracy.

Vengeance.  A force-administered soup

of psychoactive drugs. Nature or nurture.

Dominique’s history may have been nothing more

than a series of bad choices kick-started

by an over-abundance of desire.

These are old memories surfacing.

This is my break time.

I am reading in the news that today

Dominique Hughes is being sentenced for murder.

Before I can tag this in my brain onto an imaginary

white index card, something flat and easily misplaced,

something I can set down and put away,

my new manager waves me over.

He’s playing video footage of American Air-fighters

zeroing in on insurgents.  I grimace and walk away

before the blood which would probably

at this distance, not be visible, all that rubble.

They deserve it, he says, punching his desk with his fist

to make sure that I get it.

Just the day before he was telling me

about his annual hunting trip with his nephew.

He had stopped talking to apologize

because he can no longer bring himself to shoot elk,

about how he can only catch and release fish;

that’s how soft he’s become.

He said he hopes I won’t think less of him,

his new want to hold back the kill.

Some days all the want and shame,

they become too much for me to sort through.

We are all connected, I suppose,

and this is why I can no longer tell

where one desire ends and another begins.