Assistant Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: In Molly Bess Rector’s poem “Retail Therapy,” lonely girls go shopping. Across reflecting couplets, the surface of a lake in summer morphs into a department store window. Behind the window grows a garden of what was and what could be: “Oh, to dress / beyond ourselves.” Throughout the poem, Rector skillfully turns both her collective speaker and her readers toward an elsewhere, a was, a could be, a flash in the looking glass. And, finally, the girl-turned-oracle at the register offers a vision: “I love that piece. You could wear it / to a party. It looks so good on.” Try this poem on for size.
To hear Molly Bess Rector read her poem, click below:
Retail Therapy
Rainy weather and everyone with a lover
stays inside.
Not us lonely girls. We go shopping. It’s true,
we’re always seeking
some sunnier past, and shop windows have
a glitter that pays
tribute to the splendid summer lakes whose still
and brilliant surfaces
we, in youth, would split, with the arc
of a bikini-peeling dive—
how like the stillness and shine we interrupt
to pull the door
and submerge ourselves in a garden of aluminum
racks bearing brightly
their kaleidoscope of wearable blooms
we can’t help but want
to pluck. Oh, to stand before a mirror in a sundress,
to drape ourselves
in orange peonies, a backdrop of cream.
Oh, to dress
beyond ourselves. To spy, in the looking glass,
a vision of the future:
rosé on a rooftop—late May, kissing weather—
or a quilt on a park lawn.
Who could be lonely then? We don’t really have
the money, but we buy the dress.
Commerce is a kind of contact.
The girl at the register sees
what we do: I love that piece. You could wear it
to a party. It looks so good on.
Molly Bess Rector lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas where she cocurates the Open Mouth Reading Series. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Arkansas. She is the recipient of residencies from the Edward F. Albee Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, as well as a grant by the Artists 360 program to write poems exploring human intersections with nuclear technology. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, SAND, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. www.mollybessrector.com
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