Furniture is clutter and sentiment.
You know- that pull in your gut when you have to throw it out?
Because the Adirondack chair brings back
The smoke on her breath as she shot blanks from her mouth
into the air over a concrete sidewalk-
Ripping out
The slurp the slip downwards
At the corner of her lips
Leaning back into the nestle and hum of a chair
In this instance wood is bones
And the cradle of her rib cage is
supporting my back
September is still warm
The wicker is less comfortable.
I’ll keep the chair until it truly festers on the front porch
Haha! I can hear you reading that second line aloud in my head, all that pulling of guts ‘n whatnot…
What is the slurping and slipping part about?
It’s interesting how you seem to be talking about a presumably warm memory (sentiment), yet you describe it so distantly, anatomically. I like the nestle and hum bit, but the few lines after that were not nearly as strong.
The memory image is vivid, but my only hint as to its meaning to you is the fact that you’re physically comfortable, contrasted with the otherwise harsh language (shot blanks, concrete, ripping out, wood, bones, cage, even at the end, festers!?). There’s a strange duality in general, which becomes even stranger when I look back at your seemingly straightforward (almost trite) first line. Is this an ironic play on sentimentality? And what about the clutter side of things?
Cool stuff
Yo- so the middle section (after shoots blanks from her mouth over concrete sidewalk) is one that I want to pick apart and work on. Except for that last line- nestle and hum of a chair. I like that too.
As for the section after that which you thought wasn’t nearly as strong- I love those lines because it reattatches you to that sentiment- It was formatted as its own stanza but my blog wouldn’t let me do that. So… it got absorbed.
THe wicker and september lines are extrenous- but the last line is one of my better endings.
Duality- it is a dual memory. I used to sit on my mum’s lap and she would smoke a cigarette- blowing the smoke out over the porch. This was before our dog tore apart all the packs she had stashed around the house and she quit. The dog was an omen.
It is a strange play on sentimentality- I hate that i can never GET RID of stuff- even though it’s only important for the memory. My life is perpetually cluttered with shit b/c of that packrat tendency..
I might expand this to get the clutter part right.
I’m glad you got so much out of it.