This collection gathers poems centered on objects or places kept, found, or left behind that carry meaning.
Ziploc’d Messiah
The pixelated display blinks:
$4.75 for unleaded.
There is no God in this economy.
Dank, iridescent curb water swirls around my naked ankles.
The dripping nozzle clatters home with a defiant click.
I cast a sideways glance at the total through rain-fogged lenses,
but find salvation within the bowels of a crumpled Ziploc.
A relic—red, white, and laced within the Lord’s prayer.
Folded one too many times.
The messiah in his transparent tomb.
Sealed away with no stone to roll.
And no air to breathe.
Whisk
Like eggs
I crack.
The yolks spilling,
filling a purple bowl,
named “Violet”.
It’s overflowing,
while my shells lie empty.
With steel arches,
she mixes me
up.
To Bear the Fruit
Dangling
by your stem—
the forbidden fruit.
Dimpled and rot-speckled.
Not the apple of Eve nor Adam.
Grown after exile.
All natural.
Marred by the wind and rain.
Should you fall
like us,
and the deer gnaw your supple skin,
I’ll shine you on my shirt,
and taste their sloppy seconds.
Perfection is dead.
I left that garden long ago.
Freckled
Above a sink that is still “too small”
a pill-shaped ceramic sign hasn’t spoken in years.
Smudged by stove grease and dust.
Faded by kitchen light.
In our first home, it read:
“A face without freckles is like a night without stars.”
She had freckles then.
Constellations across the bridge of her nose.
At the crest of her tall cheekbones.
I mapped those stars.
On coffee-stained mornings,
and tomato soup evenings.
They are “softer now.”
Nebulas.
“It happens with time,” she says.
I wouldn’t have noticed.
Hatchet
Paulsen was God. “Hatchet” his Bible.
It screamed at me from the Scholastic Book Order on the clamshell desk I didn’t fit in.
A son of Michigan, I played amongst the knotted birch, while Pileateds pecked bullet holes in their trunks.
I wanted to make my own holes.
My own canyons.
I had shelters to build and plane crashes to survive.
An Estwing winked at me from the glass display case at the hardware store.
The hardwood floor creaked and sagged, as I swayed side-to-side, scheming the means to acquire it.
$49.95 dangling from a cotton thread tied to the glazed leather handle.
Several months begging and bartering allowances with my parents.
Paulsen didn’t mention any of that in the book.
I was a machine gun with that hatchet, arms firing like a bolt and a receiver.
A satisfying THUNK with every swing.
And as our first victim fell, my ravaged bible sat stoic on the nightstand,
its tattered cover curled into a grin.