Today is Trash Day​​

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By then I’d given up
on small salvations.

 

No more sorting
the good hours from the bad,
no more rinsing old words
until they ran clear.

 

I stood in the kitchen light,
hands on the rim of the trash,
watching a life I’d lived
in bits and pieces—
ticket stubs, cracked bangles,

the shattered cellphone,

from the week we didn’t talk.
the receipt from that night
we pretended to forgive each other—
Let all of it slide down
in one slow avalanche.

Not this for compost,
that for recycle,
this one to keep
because it almost felt like love.
No.

 

I tipped the whole thing over,
bones, breath, and paper,
into the dark.

 

From somewhere inside the bin
a fork clinked against glass,
a child’s laugh flared and went out,
my mother’s voice rose,
swelled,
fell back into plastic.

I waited for regret
to lunge at my throat,
for memory to scramble up
the slick insides
and demand to be saved.

Nothing came.

Only the quiet hum
of the refrigerator,
the thin blue line of evening
climbing the window,
and my hands, finally empty,
hanging by my sides—

two stray creatures
no longer reaching
for what was already gone.

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By Shailaja Vats Das

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Shailaja is an emerging  poet and an engineer living in Los Altos, California.

She was born and raised in a small town, Ranchi, in India, and now shares a slightly chaotic home with her husband, two teenage children, a dog, and more useless objects than she would ever agree to labeling thus. When she is not navigating her professional life or tending to her family, she is an occasional writer. Her work has appeared in an anthology Turning the Corner by Eber & Wein publishers, and is forthcoming in Superlative, A Literary Journal,  in Beyond Words Magazine, and in an anthology by Wingless Dreamers Publishers.  She is the editor of a coffee-table book, Boys II Men.

 

Website: The Voice Not Spoken

IG: @shailajavats

FB: @Shailaja.vats