The Future Critics and Judges
By Holly Day
Someday, archeologists will uncover the door of our home, make wild guesses
about the exact placement of the house number, and how
to read the characters that make up our address, write papers based upon theories
impulsively grasped at our lack of a doorbell, deduce our financial state
at our time of death by the words scrawled across the tacky dimestore doormat.
Someday, the clay ashtray I keep at the table next to my bed will become
a relic in a well-guarded museum, complete with a plaque attempting to decipher
the chicken-scrawl imprints made by kindergarten hands, the paint blob
on the inside that only I know is supposed to be a heart. Children like my own
will stare, bored, into the glass case, led by some museum docent, loudly announce
to each other that people from the past were stupid, that they
could make a pot as good as that one
in an afternoon.
Someday, future hands will stroke and catalog our furniture
wonderingly, mutter incessantly, much as we as we do now, at the way
we must have contorted our bodies to fit comfortably on chairs
too short for you and too tall for me, and on the way
no one piece matches another.
Holly Day is a housewife and mother of two living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, who teaches needlepoint classes in the Minneapolis school district. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Worcester Review, Broken Pencil, and Slipstream, and she is the recipient of the 2011 Sam Ragan Poetry Prize from Barton College. Her most recent published book is Notenlesen für Dummies Das Pocketbuch, while her novel, The Trouble With Clare, is due out from Hydra Publications in 2013.
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