Pain ricochets around my skulllike an aspirin commercial from the sixties,darting up the nasal passages, up behind the frown,the temporal bones, clutching at Godlike a desperate spark. He bound you to himby a chain of such longing. Ridiculous,pressing and pressing the button for an attendant,aching jaw, temples throbbing. When did they startlocking everything up? Do I need something,this man wants to know. Contact lens solution,root touch-up. Where is my mind?my mother said this morning. Is Daddy dead?How did he die? Do not fret after God, my book says.Well, I do fret. I’m fretted as a guitar, picking outthe same chords, arpeggios of dread wandering 24-hour chains,rehearsing my facts—one big cloud of forgetting.There are 300 muscles in the face. The time bone, the templeis called, where our hair grays first. Why aren’t the aisles marked?My God, what is that shrieking? The man doesn’t work here,he says. Reconcile yourself to wait in the darkness.What did I think spiritual desert meant? Surely not thatlump of nothing I was an hour ago on the couch, wieldingthe remote, spooning mango sorbet out of a container.It should feel, I explain to the self-checkout screen(how did I get here?), punching in my customer number,more important. What saints felt. A dreadful hunger.If you need help, the self-checkout voice is saying.Todo y nada, todo y nada, it whispers,here in the aching all-night fluorescent.
Midnight in the Pain-Relief Aisle of CVS Thinking About “The Cloud of Unknowing”
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“Midnight in the Pain-Relief Aisle of CVS Thinking About ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’”
was originally published in the March 30, 2026, issue of The New Yorker
Donna Masini is the author of Did You Find Everything You Were Looking For? (W.W. Norton and Co. 2026), 4:30 Movie (Norton), Turning to Fiction (Norton), That Kind of Danger (Beacon) and About Yvonne (Norton), a novel. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Paris Review, Poetry, et al. A recipient of an NEA, an NYFA and a Pushcart Prize, she lives in NYC and is a Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the undergraduate and MFA programs.
March 30, 2026
New York, New York
Editor-in-Chief
David J. Remnick
Poetry Editor
Kevin Young
The New Yorker is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans. Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside New York and is read internationally.
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