I sneeze and
everything that has ever meant anything
gets all over the carpet.
My roommate is using the broom and dustpan
For what, I am not sure.
We do not talk much.

Outside, a single drop of rain pounds on the window.

I look and
everything that has ever meant anything
looks a lot like dust.

***

Natalie Peterkin is an English professor and fiction editor of Pomona Valley Review. Her poems explore intense emotions displaced in a often facile world.