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A quarterly international literary journal

On the Side of the Road, We Find the Perfect Dresser




/ Poetry /


because it’s Boston Christmas, the weekend in August

when the last undergrads leave in mass exodus,

 

abandoning beds and desks and bookshelves on street corners.

They are driven by the desperate need to have less, to be lighter—

 

and the rest of us sort through the spoils. O heavy

blessings. O manna from a fourth-story apartment.

 

You and I both know what it is to be weighted, to occupy

a body whose debts are never quite repaid. All this living,

 

and what will we have to show for it in the long hall

of ancestors? Stumbling downhill, I’m telling you

 

that in middle school I believed God was calling me to be a nun

because I hated thought of living between the black fabric of a habit,

 

and a true sacrifice is something entirely unwanted (even then

I was outrageously Kantian, counting goodness like coins).

 

O breathless confession. O you poor girl. You are laughing at the thought

of me content in a convent, and so am I—imagine me ever culling

 

the flint-kick that lives in the pit of my stomach. We collect

too many things to live austerely: the myriad mass of cheap jewelry,

 

the books bent open with pages splayed like swans in flight.

Yes, even plastic bags and takeout containers are their own form

 

of wealth. See Lolo’s hoard, the crammed garage, his stacks of pressure

cookers and red ceramic plates and dehumidifiers. Nothing gone to waste,

 

just sleeping, latent. O dragon after dragon. O cavernous need.

Here you are dragging this dresser all along the street and hassling

 

two boys for their help. Watch me and these boys follow you

up the flight of stairs (at this point we might follow you up five more),

 

the medallions of your eyes so ferocious and brilliant I almost

pocket them. When we saw the dresser, you knew what would

 

fill it: old coats and loaned paperbacks and second-hand canvases,

father-fire and mother-cutlery and the furs and skins of distant exes.

 

And still: an entire empty drawer for my things when visiting. 

O spatial sacrifice. O rent-free cubicle of mahogany. Here is my body.

 

Please take and eat as I have eaten, and eaten, and eaten, please,

like my father and his father before him I have birthed

 

a whole house and every room has a bed with the sheets turned down.

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