POETRY

By Kim­ber­ly Ann Priest

“Paula, my watch is gone.”
GREGORY in Gaslight, 1944

It’s this way: after doing several loads of laundry,
or dusting every inch of slight surface in a home’s several rooms,

that you start to lose track of one thing or another—
the brown­ies you were baking that get a bit burnt,
the next episode of what­ev­er show you are watch­ing day-to-tedious day, the children’s bedtime,

yours;

lunch half-nibbled and not thrown away still lin­ger­ing on its plate
on the kitchen counter, the purse con­tain­ing your wallet,
the purse, the children’s bedtime, yours; the final pages
of a book you never get to read because you read the pages beforehand
again for three days straight with a weird sense of déjà vu
each time, then give up, bleach—you forgot to add it to the whites
so you rewash them (he can always tell when you’ve forgotten
the bleach), but then forget to put the load in the dryer when it’s done.
And you never remem­ber to floss.
He always tells you to remem­ber to floss.
You did, however, remem­ber to put the vacuum away—thankfully.

Your mind could be held up like a small silver ball at the end
of a chain—tick, tick, tock—and spun, and you wouldn’t even feel
the motion after so many ques­tions asked con­cern­ing your ability
to fold towels cor­rect­ly as he shows you how it should be done,
dumping
the tidy squares out of their basket and unto the bed
and spread­ing one open to slice his hand into a new terry-looped crease
like a highly qual­i­fied hotel maid.

When he asks you to prac­tice, you do.

When he asks you why you did so little around the house today,
you answer, forgetfully.

So he asks you again, a little more firmly, what did you do with your 
time?

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 18.

Photo by Seyfet­tin Dincturk.