Few sentences are more ordinary than "What do you need from the store?" Jasmine Christi's "Grocery List" opens with exactly that question and seems content to stay in the kitchen. Then the list arrives: Milk, Eggs, Birth Control. The third item doesn't belong to the same register as the first two, yet it sits in the same plain capitals, as if it were one more thing to pick up on the way home. The list is then repeated word for word, and the poem ends with a line that undoes the whole errand: "I never buy any of those things."
On the surface, someone is asked about shopping and answers by saying what they don't buy. Underneath, the poem is about distance from a certain kind of life. Milk and eggs suggest a household, with breakfasts, baking and people to feed. Birth control suggests a partner, or at least a sexual life that needs managing. The speaker steps away from all of it. The poem never says why, and that silence is its main method. Judging by the text alone, the speaker might live alone, might leave the shopping to someone else, or might be refusing a role. Each reading fits, and none is confirmed. What the poem delivers is a mood: a flat, slightly sealed-off feeling of standing outside ordinary domestic routine.
There is also a quieter possibility in the arrangement. Eggs and milk are breakfast staples, but they are also the raw materials of reproduction and nurture. Placed beside "Birth Control," they turn the list into a tiny sequence: nourishment, then prevention. This is an inference rather than something the poem states, but the way three short lines are stacked invites it.
The construction is stripped to the bone. There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The poem borrows the shape of a real list, with one item per line, each capitalised and none punctuated. The only punctuation mark in the whole poem is the opening question mark, so the answer to that question comes out as a bare run of words, with no hesitation or comment attached. The rhythm still does some work. "Milk" and "Eggs" are single syllables, quick and light. "Birth Control" has three syllables and two heavy stresses, so the list slows down at the moment its content gets weightier. Repeating the whole block makes the phrase land twice. It might be an order read back for confirmation, a list nagging in someone's head, or an echo the speaker can't shake. The repetition lets the reader hear "Birth Control" a second time, after the shock of seeing it among the groceries has worn off.
The final line changes the poem's texture. It is the first and only appearance of "I," so the speaker enters only to disown the list. The line is longer and more conversational than anything before it, and almost every word is short and plain. "Never" and "any" are absolutes, closing every exception. Then there is "those things." The speaker won't repeat the words "birth control," or even "milk" and "eggs," and retreats into a vague noun, pointing at the items from arm's length with "those." The line also sidesteps the question. Asked what they need, the speaker says what they never buy, which is a different thing and perhaps a more revealing one.
Imagery is minimal, and that is deliberate. The objects are the images. Milk and eggs are concrete, white and perishable, while birth control is a category rather than a product, something we can't picture without supplying our own context. The grocery frame is the poem's central image. By putting birth control on a shopping list, the poem treats it as routine, an errand rather than a secret. Against that normality, the speaker's refusal stands out all the more.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it leaves unsaid. In under twenty words of list and a single sentence of response, it raises questions of loneliness, choice, control and belonging without answering any of them. Readers have to fill the gaps with their own assumptions, and the poem quietly shows how many different lives could produce the same flat sentence.