Julie McElhone #30 Table with Contents

The kitchen table where we meet dependable she and I 

and have breakfast and teach and argue and storm away from 

and come back to and learn and make craft and pile books

—extendable—

an often lonely answer

to the call of things. Those, those things, 

pose like undisciplined acrobats,

the debris of our day sometimes in rhyming couplets:

there’s a bus pass 

and a drinking glass

a cut-up toilet roll 

in a wooden bowl

a tiger key ring 

and a ball of string

you get the picture: unruly data

shape shifting reliefs of each other.