1 poem

MOVING VAN

                        after Raymond Carver

When it was all loaded, I could easily arrange

the contents of the truck—a wall of boxes

filled with unopened mail, clothes I never

wore and didn’t want, some knick-knacks

I couldn’t remember buying but she

insisted were mine nonetheless, plus

a leather recliner she bought me for our tenth

anniversary, the nightstand from my side

of the bed, and the small TV from the den.

The empty space in the van made me realize

all these years I’d already been half-gone—

I didn’t have enough faith to accumulate more.

I climbed in the back, sat in the recliner,

and put my beer on the nightstand. I could live

here, maybe, I thought—on the street, in front

of the house. Did she want me out of her life

or just out of our house?—or her house, I guess.

Maybe after all the months of asking me

to get rid of some of the junk around

the house, she realized I was part of the junk

and she could send us all off in this neat

little package shaped like a moving van.

Thom Hawkins is a writer and artist based in Maryland. His poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Excuse Me Magazine, The Fieldstone Review, Linked Verse, Poetry Box, Sinking City, and Uncensored Ink's Banned Books Anthology.