After having a panic attack in Target Optical

So this is the world you have missed:
not only mothers with their children
in the grocery store, gentle pleas
and easy giggles,
not only libraries, their casual sharing,
your fingers happier
for having brushed the spines
of books you‘ll read,
not only indefensible
kindnesses—please
go ahead of me in line, here
is the quarter you dropped,
I love your earrings.

But also this: prickly heat on your neck,
back, belly, a woman‘s voice
grabbing you from the inside
and shaking, your children‘s hands
like brands on your back, shoulders, thighs,
each of their movements a shudder,
mapping the routes to the door,
mapping them again,
and again,
walking one of those lines
before the optician is done,
wondering if you should run,
wondering if you can go back,
wondering what she will think
and what your children will think,
your son and

your daughter, who once,
when she was three, came sobbing
up the stairs in the dead of night,
you tearing out of sleep to meet her,
kneeling, cheap wall-to-wall carpet
pressing into your knees,
tears glazing her face. She gasped out
her nightmare:

you were eating noodles
and you accidentally sneezed
and they fell out of your mouth

and a bit of you
wanted to laugh

but the rest of you opened wide
to hear:

her horror is you
uncontrolled.