After Moving We Bump Into the Space Left By the Bed
We eat what will not travel:
a half box of popsicles,
stew from last night’s supper.
Twenty black bags wallow at the curb,
plumb with trash and stale air.
What’s left to toss we leave for morning,
the bang and bustle of city workers
carting away our litter.
We will not follow the trucks
down to the fields where burning
and burial collapses everything
into memory.
For now the house is quiet.
We stroll by instinct down a familiar corridor
with just enough moon to see faces
reflected in curtainless windows.
Emptiness confuses,
but that’s not you in a bed,
that’s not the dog that followed me
everywhere.
It’s only the city tub with its urgent
message painted white
across its blue side:
recycle.
Larry Fontenot has had poetry published in Arrowsmith, Chachalaca Poetry Review, Curbside Review, i.e. magazine, Maverick Press, Melic Review, Pebble Lake Review, Red River Review, RiverSedge, Snow Monkey and Sulphur River Literary Review. Larry was a Juried Poet at the 2005 Houston Poetry Fest and a Featured Poet at the 2000 Fest. A chapbook, Choices & Consequences, was the winner of the Maverick Press 1996 Southwest Poets’ Series Chapbook competition. Larry also won the 2000 Alsop Review Poetry Competition, an Honorable Mention in Sol Magazine’s Poet Laureate 2002 Competition, and was a finalist in the 2005 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. (poboy@hotmail.com)