Moving

Moving

 
We confront accumulation. No room 
exempt from purge; no cupboard left for later.
 
The dump pile: broken furniture,
ancient computers, worn tires. The shredder grinds
tax returns from the Paper Age.
 
But what of our outdated mix tapes, those amateur
epistolaries of our moods? Do we jeopardize
our future if we discard our history? Can we let go
 
of the frayed comforter without losing comfort?
What will happen to our first leather jackets
we so loved for protecting our jittery egos?
 
Exhausting decisions bludgeon us unconscious.
I wake to a blurry moon framed by an open window,
suddenly aware our attic is full of forgotten boxes.
 
In pajamas, I lift a corrugated flap and startle
a skeleton. A sepia skull with still-white teeth, tibia, fibula,
a clavicle shaped like a bull’s horn, fractured ribs. Who
 
boxed these bones? Why? The next box holds a ladder
of smirking vertebrae that were once a painful spine.
I tear open box after box and find flat fragile scapulas,
 
pelvises like steampunk gas masks, finger bones reaching
from mottled clusters of carpus. One skeleton with wings
flies to the rafters, dangling over me, and as I cry out, doomed,
 
this skeleton assures me everything
will be all right once we move on.

First published in The Pedestal Magazine

 

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