What’s in a tin can anymore, milk container, last week’s dribbled talk down a plastic cup? Or this broken adjective that used to be Toscano wine, a kind of brown vision in clear glass. This hail to thee with last year’s expiration date I’m dropping into a half-empty dumpster. A bit of rot in the air, something sour, though we’ve flattened all our cardboard boxes, sent them sailing, delivery confirmed—all that love taken apart in the kitchen, exposing gleaming gadgets: a grandma’s note, an aunt’s demur, a sister’s once-used vaporizer. Isn’t this about sharing? The cleaned-out, too gingery salad oil bottle? The twice laundered mat for a shelter’s cats, the big dogs who frighten God Himself who made them not thinking? Life folding inward like containers nesting into each other, all appetite heaved away.
John Allman | Sadness Contents | Mudlark No. 48 (2012)