Grocery List Poetry

My partner writes the grocery lists in our house, and somewhere along the way they started turning into poems. Not good poems. Wonderful, terrible poems.

"Eggs, a dozen, brown and bold / milk before the old one's old / something green, I don't know what / and chocolate, which we always forgot."

I started saving them on the fridge with magnets. Our nephew visits and reads them out loud in a dramatic theater voice. Guests ask about them. One friend now writes her own lists in rhyme and sends us photos.

It costs nothing and it makes a chore into a tiny gift. I read the list in the store aisle and laugh out loud next to the cereal like a lunatic. Every week I get a new one, and every week I fall for the same goofy person a little more.