Today's poem is by John A. Nieves

Postbang
       

The closet is dead, okay? Its back was blown
              out and the darkness it held like a warm
              sweater had unfurled into hideous light—
              a beige that stole the green off the grass.
              The explosion took so little, really, but what
it took, it took completely. Like quiet, which became

              a nursery rhyme, something you made up to
              keep the little ones happy. Like the calendar
that hung on the closet door, now only the savage
              curls of too big eyelashes on the wrecked
              pine floor. But the door itself survived.

Recontextualized, it rested flat on the queen bed,
              hinges all a-twist. And intimacy. Once something
              inside has become outside, it never really gets to be
              inside again. A room that once felt far from the weeds
              feels them now like a starchy tag on a new shirt,
an irritant we all pretend to ignore while it rubs raw.

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Copyright © 2023 John A. Nieves All rights reserved
from Poetry South
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission