Museum of single use objects
Look at what’s left
when the need’s gone:
a keen curation of unneed
for the alarm clock; its programmatic
relationship to morning
to us, when we were still in college.
to work, when we were new-
ly in debt.
And the flashlight stuck
in the drawer by the back door.
You could spot things
like it was a sudden thing
and inside
a star. Only balloons (breath
sectioned
and rounded with rubber)
were left on the floor
after a graduation party.
For what it is—is just a room
no matter what decade you’re sitting in.
I raised a girl in this room
and glued
her snapped
horse figurine at the hock
needed for weeding
the hamper of single knee-high socks.
And I’m certain that girls
were the first
multi-purpose item. What she does
with the picture window, for instance; buttering
in the elm bark, and this autumn
will be aggressively light-
footed:
paper plates, fewer strewn q-tips, popsicle sticks,
a punk mouth.
She’s uptaken for something
else in the kitchen, all mixed-in; mixly body
with utensils, imparting the triangular design.
Someone once told me a joke
where the man confused his wife leaving
with a broken
refrigerator.
Down the hallway—bookshelves, ourselves,
What doesn’t need dusting, still knows
when she’s looked at, exactly how
she might be seen.
As seen through a kaleidoscope: one image
with irregular reflections—broken
bits of color, but a fixed picture. Falling
from symmetry and sense, if
it weren’t so confined
—as seen through your mother.
And what’s left around here? More
and more, these days
we model from girls. Siri, Sora,
while you’re in this bed with me,
set an alarm and show me
how the sun would rise
if we no longer
had a use for it.
Catherine L. Reeves is a lawyer in Wyoming. You may find her poetry and articles in Poetry Online, The Penn Review, TLR, Rust + Moth, and Plath Profiles.