Terri Brown-Davidson – Ⅲ

Contamination 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you crave contamination? my husband demands.

His red-rimmed eyes, a bloodhound’s, track me

across the Legos-littered carpet where, casting aside

the effluvia of our child, I’ve primped, stacked, arranged

six embroidered pillows my neighbors discarded

for fresher digs and domains,

their cross-country quest for new nirvana

undiking glittering floodwaters of cast-off armada:

ragrugs and baubles, hardbacks and lava lamps

the dreamer in me tracks as avidly

as any hunter eyeing an exotically silver wolf

across acres of blue-iced tundra

though more quietly, while my family sleeps, I dip a mental pen

in imagination’s ink, rock cross-legged on six ragged pillows

and keep writing through densening tangles

of art and longing. Sadness and dementia.