Remainders

"If we can’t have everything what is the closest amount to everything we can have?"
                                                                                                                                                    ~ Emily Berry                                                                                                                                                                                                                 


I keep receipts from trips to the Asian market, because they list
what I've craved like a poem. Bitter melon, mustard greens, beef 
shank with marrow bone. Freckled pear and kabocha, sweet
tocino patties, head-on shrimp. Jacobina crackers like miniature 
squares of clay: two could shingle your tongue. At home, I pour 
short-grain rice into a clear plastic storage box. I pour slowly, 
to invoke the sound of rain. A bottle of wild lime juice goes into
the fridge; the seal remains unbroken, but I can almost feel
the pucker and how my eyes squint as if from too much sun.
When we come indoors one afternoon, the power is out.
The vegetables would be fine, but I worry that the tray of fish 
we bought would go bad. The power comes back in two hours. 
Days later, news reports say a raccoon  made contact with
electric wires at the substation. I wonder what it saw, 
what it thought, when the life went out of him.