——Some hoarders imbue the inanimate with a kind of sensibility or sentience.
—————Ferris Jabr, Scientific American

Most objects do object to being moved:
crates of paperbacks cracking, a creaking hutch
of china the clumsy among us won’t touch.
Stuck lids refuse. The hardwood, tongue-and-grooved,
groans with each step to recycling bins
distended with wire hangers and one faux-bronze bust
of Alec Douglas-Home. Mossy with dust,
pill bottles jostle against jars of safety pins.

Beyond an ample appetite for kitsch,
no theme emerges from her ten-packs of tube socks,
a snow-globe collection clinking in a liquor box,
mushroom-brim hats and cardigans that itch.
Too easy to dismiss her half-dozen heads of deer
on crooked mounts, torn Cabbage Patch dolls
with clothes she sewed herself. If estrangement dulls
familial affection, her strangeness seems to endear.

I notice we laugh less as the day progresses
from lugging trash bags of box-set Disney DVDs
through heaped-newspaper halls that make us sneeze
to hauling mattresses and folding dresses
that belonged to her daughter killed in Kandahar.
The burn pile cools. Dusk opens a pinkish wound.
Spreading blankets over boot-trampled ground,
our kids lie back and point out hole-punched stars.

 

 

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Brian Brodeur’s most recent book is Some Problems with Autobiography, which won the 2022 New Criterion Prize. New poems and criticism appear in Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Los Angeles Book Review, Southern Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle.