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Trifle
R. A. Allen

You find it in the basement
behind the furnace—a long-lost curio,
machine stamped and caked with grime—
but you bring it upstairs nonetheless.
Handling it puts you into a dissociative
fugue. As bewildered as a wildebeest
with the turning disease, you circle
through the house sans purpose.
Too, your feelings about this objet d’crap
trigger sighs, moist eyes, and eels
in the stomach. It’s that mopey delusion
known as nostalgia. Snap out of it!
You’re being annoying.
Really, dude, just throw it away.

—
R. A. Allen’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Quarterly, RHINO, B O D Y, The Penn Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Hollins Critic, the anthology Celestial Musings, and elsewhere. His fiction has been published in The Literary Review, The Barcelona Review, PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Best American Mystery Stories 2010, among others. He lives in Memphis, a city of light and sound.

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