Surprise Trash Day
Trash Day in our neighborhood operates like a traveling speakeasy. We can never get the date right, but always see the drunk guests dragging their bins back to the garage. The day seems to occur twice weekly, but follows a schedule aligned with the moon, or the Farmers’ Almanac, or the whims of a city worker who recently endured a difficult breakup. If we could only learn the secret once, we think, we would always know it, but instead, we hear the familiar machinery, and my husband curses, tripping out into the snow in fraying slippers.
Snow Moon
When the moon locks me in its gaze through the window on the stairs, I get the distinct feeling that it exists in my teeth. I feel it buzz in a filling, amalgam, the source of some invisible illness that has plagued me my whole life. Later, when I glance to the dark and cannot find it, I know I will not live until morning if I don’t see it again. So I unlatch the door to the roof and pad into the cold until it glows, searing and naked, above me. I tilt my head, an animal considering a puzzle.
