Andrew Stone’s “A Minor Tantrum” uses its bad feeling to commune, unsparingly, with the sublime displays of a yuppie supermarket. Cornered in dull aisles of consumer oblivion, menaced by eviction as well as confinement, the poem unfolds in the manner of a breathing exercise. It manages its feeling by parsing out the scene of its frustration until the packaged fruit betrays an unnerving order: a command from elsewhere that dictates some baroque and repetitive labor, whose material expression continues to reverberate inside the poet’s head. The hushed acts of observation, surrender, and defiance that comprise the poem’s action bleed together, unknown to the world but alive in the poet’s nerves. Stone voices a quiet rebelliousness, as pensive about its experience as it is uncertain of its own possessions. —The Editors and the Poetry Staff
A Minor Tantrum
I’m ready like you said I should be
Staring at the cubed fruit
The long row of cubed assorted fruit
Well the berries as we know are small from the start
But the melons need to be cubed
To fit inside the plastic box
I start to think new thoughts
“Go to bed, home, your room”
don’t know who’s telling me this
Equally in the poem and my mouth
By which I mean my tongue is a house
I don’t own and can’t afford