Emily Williamson

I’m a very simple man. You’ve got to have, like, a computer nowadays to turn the TV on and off, and the nightmare continues.

— Ozzy Osbourne

Can’t blame the man who wants a simple choice,
A single flavor of things, like milk or bacon,
Or, hell, the joys of bat decapitation.
I share this with the OzMan — our nightmare of logins,
 
Reboots, control-deletes and verifications,
And tweets, repeat and post, like the whole damn world
Is a password lost, my mother’s maiden name,
The street where I grew up, my best friend’s dog.
 
If I were to slice a landfill clean as a loaf,
I’d find the thrown-out goods there stratified.
The patient possessions of the past still lie
There, flawless as Pompeii or Oetzi from the Alps.
 
I mean the Walkman layer. The one with gremlin heads,
Wall phones with cords, and decals like Baby on Board,
Warped VCRs, and carbon paper, Flowbees,
Monopoly thimbles, Moon Boots, Rotary dials,
 
Parachute pants, the moon, and Garfield’s ass,
(Poor fella, caught in all those crank-up windows)
The hollow carcass of the Millennium Falcon,
And a Breyer horse, a still-born Polaroid.
 
The trash tells all. From where it started out
To me — a dinosaur — now gone the way
Of the wallpaper store, the sewing machine repair.
We’re made of all the stuff we’ve thrown away,
 
From arrowheads to ear spools, fishing hooks
Of abalone shell, and ferrous awls,
The broken dish the maid could not abide,
The hand-wrought nails, the medicine bottle glass
 
Turned lavender by sun and manganese,
Patinaed window panes and baby teeth,
Old whiskey jugs, and ironstone, great stacks
Of broken headboards, chairs, steel barrel hoops,
 
Distorted wagon wheels, mining claims,
Red Bakelite casino chips and beads,
Bel Airs and Chesterfield tobacco tins,
Sweet Esther Williams’ face on a Wheaties box,
 
Ford engine blocks, and stirrup pants, and cans
Of faded Pabst Blue Ribbon, and like I said,
The gutted remains of Ozzy Osbourne’s tapes —
Their shiny ribbons flashing in the sun.
 
It’s all there, stacking up, still growing.
But if I had to pick one single thing,
One fragment of a temporary life,
The exceptional phenomenon of me,
 
It’s just this off-white café coffee mug,
Crazing and chipped, in a plain café, in a town
Where the coffee’s even plainer, when it comes,
Burnt black but weak, with cleverly tepid cream.
 
A coffee that won’t put on airs, that won’t
Declare its kinship with dry cabernet
Or camembert, where I can stare through panes
Of unwashed windows, to a steady mountain range
 
And all its folded age, its stoic frown.
Just watch. It doesn’t move. It doesn’t change
In the sunbaked sky and all I ever knew.
A simple thing that keeps on slowing time.

Formerly an archaeologist, EMILY WILLIAMSON is a writer, editor, and literary agent currently based in Baltimore, MD. Her poetry has appeared in The Waterhouse Review and is forthcoming in Measure. Her short stories have appeared in Blackbird, Word Riot, Peacock Journal & Peacock Journal Anthology: Beauty First, another was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open 2012. She has a BA in Anthropology from American University and an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University.