If you wish to be refined

as you stand in the checkout line

always grab one of those bars

that separates your food from thars.

Nothing makes people so edgy

as mixing with a stranger’s veggies.

Do not allow your pecan pies

to slip the line and socialize

with the next person’s frozen peas.

Much better have some rare disease

than infringe on someone’s space.

Keep your produce in its place.

Isolate your own bananers

if you wish to please Miss Manners.

Only the ruffian commingles

his corn chips with another’s Pringles.

True, that while in the aisles

all that food was stacked in piles,

crammed together on the shelf.

But in line, keep it to yourself

and etiquette shan’t be demeaned.

Keep your foodstuffs quarantined.

Oh, never let your ice cream melt

and leak on the conveyor belt,

and always try to avoid

slowing the line for a tabloid.

But the most heinous check-out sin

is forgetting to fence in

your food with those little rods.

This offends the grocery gods.

Take it from your local grocer.

No other grocery crime is grosser.

(This was my entry for a contest sponsored by the Indiana State Federation of Poetry Clubs. It won 1st place, I’m guessing because people can relate to those little rods!)