It’s January, and our neighbors are being evicted.
A little girl in a costume dress drags dining room
chairs onto the sidewalk, scraping wooden legs.
Outside of our apartment is a garage sale with no tags.
The pile shrinks every morning as tenants grab side tables,
lamps, stuffed animals, and a magnet bottle opener
like vultures dissecting a rotting possum in the road.
Today, we awoke to suffocating spray-paint fumes,
acetone sliding down my esophagus. Next door,
the turnover process has already begun:
Spread spackling paste where frames once hung,
bleach laminate countertops, strip the shower of song,
paint over graphite dashes measuring height and age—
tree rings hidden beneath bark.
Hailing from Titusville, Florida, and studying poetics at the University of Oxford, Sarah G. Pouliot works as a nonprofit grant writer and an editor of the new literary magazine Wandering Lights. You can read more of her poetry and stories in Saw Palm, Timber, The Bluebird Word, October Hill Magazine, Ekstasis, and Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle.
Appears In
Cagibi Issue 27
