July 27, 2021

fresh starts

Certain mornings, the light comes through the windows like an accusation—
You aren’t doing enough—and rain, pooling under the front steps, wags our weakness
in front of us, as if we needed the reminder. So we go back to the list of what we think
needs fixing. We enter the gleaming aisles that smell chemically of fresh starts.
Our baskets fill with hinges and sandpaper and tubes of grout, a can of paint the color
of a feeling that promises to change the channel. We follow the next set of instructions. 
We tighten the screws. We tidy up. We feel the rosy wash of completion.

I wonder if we’ve been lying to ourselves.
For one, the intemperate sky.
For another, everything we have already touched.