I Write Poems on the Backs of Receipts
My best work lives between grocery totals and thank-you-visit-agains.
My collected works are held together by a rubber band and smell faintly of onions.
I write poems on the backs of receipts. Not as an aesthetic. Not as a quirky personal brand. It started because a poem arrived in the checkout line of More Supermarket on a Tuesday evening in 2018, and the only paper within reach was the bill for two kilos of onions, one dishwash bar, and a packet of glucose biscuits. The poem did not care. Poems never care. They show up like relatives, without calling first, and expect to be accommodated.
That first one was about my father's hands, which is embarrassing to admit because every beginner writes about their father's hands. I wrote it against the ATM kiosk outside, using a pen borrowed from the security guard, who watched me the whole time with the expression of a man who has seen stranger things but not many.
I could have bought a notebook. I want to be clear about that. I own notebooks. I own beautiful notebooks, gifted by people who love me and believe in me, notebooks with cream pages and ribbons, and every one of them is blank... because a beautiful notebook is a courtroom. A receipt is a bathroom wall. You can say anything on a receipt. Nobody expects the back of a grocery bill to be good, and so, freed from the tyranny of expectation, it occasionally is.
Over the years the habit metastasized. Chemist receipts, auto rickshaw fare slips, the long ribbony ones from the department store that give you a discount coupon for a shop you will never visit. Restaurant bills are premium stock: thick paper, and you're already sitting down. Parking tickets are for haiku only. There is a poem about my grandmother's last Diwali on the back of a bill for a phone charger, and I maintain it is the best thing I have ever written, partly because almost nobody has ever read it.
My wife discovered the situation through the laundry, the way wives discover most situations. A jeans pocket went through the machine with four poems in it and came out as papier-mache with feelings. She unpeeled one clump, read the three surviving words, and said, "Is this about me?"
"It's about the monsoon," I said.
"It says my name."
"The monsoon and you overlap thematically."
My marriage has survived many things, including a lint trap full of sonnets. She now checks my pockets before washing anything, not to save the trousers, she says, but because she refuses to be the woman who destroyed my archive. She says archive with a very specific tone. I have chosen not to examine the tone.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about writing on receipts: thermal paper forgets. The ink is not ink, it's heat, and after a year in a drawer... the words begin to walk away. They fade from the outside in, like a photograph left on a windowsill, until you're holding a blank white curl of paper... that you know used to be about your mother.
I have a shoebox of these. Blank receipts that used to be poems.
I keep them anyway. It feels wrong to throw away paper that once meant something, even when it can no longer remember what.
Poems do not wait for good paper. They arrive when your hands are full and dare you to drop something.
For six years, my regular billing counter at the supermarket was manned by a man named Joseph. Joseph was sixty-ish, precise, and disapproved of my loose vegetables on principle. We spoke maybe eleven words per transaction. Card or cash, carry bag, sir your cabbage. I thought of him, when I thought of him at all... as furniture with opinions.
Then last March there was a small laminated sign at his counter: WE THANK MR. JOSEPH FOR 26 YEARS OF SERVICE. His last day. I mumbled congratulations while he scanned my dal, and he did something he had never done in six years.
He reached under the counter.
He brought out a plastic folder, the kind school children use, and slid it across to me between the dal and the card machine.
Inside were receipts. Mine.
Fourteen of them, flattened, some photocopied, because, he explained, he knew the paper fades. Fourteen poems I had scribbled at his counter or left in the basket or dropped between the counter and the door over six years, each one retrieved, read, and kept by a man I had said cabbage to.
"You left them," he said, as though returning an umbrella.
"You kept them," I said, as though that explained anything either.
He tapped one photocopy, a poem about the fruit seller outside who arranges his oranges like a man setting a chessboard. "This one," he said, "I read to my wife. She said the fellow finally wrote something without his father's hands in it." Then he printed my bill, handed it to me blank side up, and said, "Sir. Carry bag?"
I stood in the parking lot for a long time...
There is a particular shame in learning you had a reader all along and tipped him nothing but exact change.
All those years I had told myself I wrote on receipts because the poems were disposable, because I was not a real writer, because real writers have desks and discipline and cream pages. Joseph had quietly disagreed with me for six years, at a rate of one rescued poem every five months, and never once mentioned it, the way you don't mention that you've been watering a neighbour's plant.
That evening I did something I had been avoiding for a decade. I typed the poems up. All of them, the folder ones and the shoebox survivors, transcribing the half-faded lines while they could still be read, like taking down the testimony of a dying witness. The orange-seller poem I posted on a community wall for poets, where strangers said kind things Joseph would have found excessive. Another one, the Diwali one from the phone charger bill, I entered into a monthly poetry contest, my first submission anywhere... ever.
It got shortlisted.
I printed the email and, out of a loyalty I cannot fully defend, folded it to the size of a receipt.
I also finally understood what the habit had been doing for me all along. Someone once shared a prompt that said: write where you are standing, on whatever is in your hand, before the feeling gets self-conscious. I had been obeying it for years without knowing it existed. The receipts were never the point. The point was that the checkout line, the auto stand, the chemist's counter, all of it counted as a writing desk, which meant all of it counted as a life worth taking down.
Joseph moved back to his hometown near Thrissur. We exchange messages sometimes, mostly about the weather, occasionally about his grandson. In December he sent me a photograph with no caption. It was a receipt from a local tea shop, turned over, with four lines in Malayalam on the back in a careful sixty-eight-year-old hand.
I don't read Malayalam. I asked him what it said.
"Nothing much," he replied. "It is about my wife. But sir, you understand. The paper was there."
The paper was there.
That's the whole secret, and it took a billing clerk to teach it to me. Somewhere in a drawer, his poem is already fading, the heat-ink loosening its grip letter by letter, and neither of us minds as much as we should. You write it anyway. You write it on whatever the day hands you, between the total and the thank you, and you let the paper forget, because for one moment in a checkout line, somebody remembered.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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