Dear reader, snooper, unknown friend,
I have meager offerings pulled from the vaults for you today. A scrappish scrap. A poem rejected from so many publications that it has a home here, now. It’s about unloved merchandise, and it is itself an unloved product. For all that, there’s still beauty in a bottomfeeder. Fortuitous flotsam. A seed. It came to you.
What will you do with it, finding it here? You can respond to it. Replace this poem in the sea bottle with one of your own and cast it back out on the waves. Stick it up on a wall, scribble in its margins. What does it make you think about? What places, what things? If this poem has been rejected in so many places, maybe you can give it worth again by writing three lines back, or a few thoughts, or by sending it out again. Anything to make it not dead. Anything to keep it from the landfill.
Ocean State Job Lot on a Monday Night Here lies Misfit clothes, missing buttonhole Snagged butterfly nets, scratched-cover smut books, High heels zip tied at the ankle, a chip flavor you’ve never heard of. Overstock, deadstock laid out to dry under buzzing lights. Here you could buy A rug that Switches patterns halfway through, Unbranded bag of fused gummy bears, Swears on socks to make you feel funny, secretly. I want to take that messed-up rug home And love it, give it the life it’ll never have, But I don’t. I walk out into twilight and watch Killdeer wheel and keen in the cracked parking lot And they are there because the pavement is so wide they think it’s a meadow – Hear a cricket ask for a mate he won’t find for miles – And I think how beautiful, cricket-call, how the birds cry and dive And I don’t think about the truck that will arrive tomorrow to Ship off the last chance! clearance! trash-treasures from Ocean State Job Lot into a Place where they cannot be bought Anymore
This has been a letter to you about everything and nothing. What’s your trash? What’s your treasure?
I for one am going back to bed. I doubt the switched-pattern rug is still out there, but it’s alive in my memory today.
~ Affectionately yours,
T. R. Enchant
Some of my happiest recent memories are about digging through second-hand electronics, old computers, cables, retro game consoles & controllers in blue plastic crates or peddled by street vendors, things other people might consider trash, in a neighbourhood aptly named "electric town". I didn't find what I was lowkey looking for but it was an enjoyable treasure hunt nonetheless.