SHEDDING FURNITURE LIKE I SHED HAIR

A Moving Saga

A poem for The Lark poetry competition

You would think, by now, my mane would have gotten the memo: shed only in the shower, congregate solely in brush and comb.

But, no, my follicles follow their own muse, releasing will o’ the wisp clusters and wafts with neither rhyme nor rhythm –

freely versed, kind of disgusting yet constructive, inspiring, too. A reminder

I am, after all, a mammal.

An airy-fairy mammal, I’ll grant you that. A primate perceiving Signs

even in hair clusters leaping like simians from tree to tree, like centipedes skittering across floors. A rainforest of kinky screeches to untangle:

Shed that sofa, that daybed, that table, those chairs. They’re not where they should be – in someone else’s home. Downsizing is upsizing –

that chi may flow more cleanly, clearing space for poems to alight like magic carpets in pre-flight

while I spiral like ivy along a mural wall of sky until my reach is a hairsbreadth closer to the dwarf star that would look so good on my new mantle –

sparking faster than a flip of a switch fire.

©Jenine Bsharah Baines 2022

I was cleaning the baseboards at the rental condo I will officially call Home on August 22 when I saw it — a hair, obviously mine. My God, I shed!

Nothing like scrubbing dust and scuff marks with Mr. Clean’s ‘Magic Eraser’ to prep a poem about magically erasing pieces of the past — whether they’re stuff-stuff like a daybed or memories we’ve lain within for too long.

Thank you, Denise Larkin, for the home for my praise song at The Lark. Thank you, dearest readers, for spiraling to the stars with me.

If you’d like to enter the poetry competition, there’s still time!

Love. jeni

please click here if inclined to ponder, play, dream with me.

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