Sarah Mills

Notes App Poem Written on an Unseasonably Warm November Day While the Dishwasher Runs

--Late fall, and so many flowers dragging their pink heels.  

--I understand their hesitation. We hold on to that which tricks us into feeling alive.   

--I keep the dishwasher full because I have known emptiness. And because I like how it sings to itself.   

--On nights I can’t sleep, I run the dishwasher and I make lists in my head.  

--A list of my favorite cereals when I was a child: Golden Grahams, Raisin Bran, Corn Chex, Cinnamon Life.  

--Business ideas: a leaf blower but instead of leaves it blows you into an alternate dimension where everything is okay.   

--Is this anything?  

--If I fall asleep while the dishwasher runs, it sanitizes my dreams.  

--Don’t forget to buy dish detergent. Toilet paper. 
 
--A mint candy on the ground, gleaming like a dinner plate. The fine china we never use.

--I can't see my breath in the cold anymore.

--I have become so intimate with longing, the same useless scarf is wrapped around both of our necks. 

--Will I spend the rest of my life singing over my grief?  

--A drought but I'm drowning.   

--A flood but it’s just the dishwasher overflowing.

--A list of everything I’ve had to bury, then excavate, to get here.

--Putting poems in the dishwasher on the heavy cycle. Top rack only.

--Rinsing out these words like an empty jar of spaghetti sauce. Recycling them. 

--Morning lawn, a massacre of maple leaves.

--Mischief Night, toilet paper swaying from branches like streamers for a party no one attended.   

--And then, without hesitation—the wind.