Boxes

This is how your driver’s license,
Macy’s and social security
card will wind up in a Ziploc bag
on top of the brown striated box
from Office Depot.

You don’t bounce back after
the heart surgery even though
you do seventy laps the week before.
The truth is you aren’t the bouncy type.
Remember the gout toe,
the cane you used for three weeks?
Now you have trouble exhaling that baby blue
Spirometer ball.  It barely moves,
and neither do you.

You lose your keys, your wallet,
your teal Marlins cap. Then you lose
your will to live.  You exercise
your fingers as you click
the remote in your green recliner.
You stop looking forward
to three p.m. chocolate ice cream
and The New Price Is Right.

Voices blur in your ears
as if you are under water:
Keep fighting, feed yourself
Sit on the edge of the bed.
But you can’t. Meanwhile
bills and documents stack up in
boxes; they’re almost dead ringers
for thicker cardboard Shiva chairs
that will be delivered
from Weinstein’s Funeral home.

Your children will sit on them,
fidgeting and then they’ll go
through your unopened mail.
They’ll buy a box at Dunkin Donuts
with the coupon that expires in two weeks,
having found it just in time.

Haya Pomrenze’s poetry collection, Hook, was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Irrepressible Appetites and Saints of Hysteria:  A Half Century of Collaborative American Poetry, as well as numerous journals including Gulf Stream, Mima’amakim, Mipoesias, Pearl, Zeek and Ocho.

Her poem “Boxes” was first published in Pearl.

Poetry Quote:

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
–Robert Frost