~
Now That We Use TV-tray Tables For Dinner, Our Transformation into a Middle-aged Married Couple Is Complete
It’s the couch’s fault, really.
Months keep vanishing and we reminisce
about the 90s like it were yesterday. We lose
track of the decades, all our favorite songs
are classic rock cannon, and dinnertime’s
turned to early-bird special here.
The new sectional I bought doesn’t allow
for the wooden beast—the chunky pecan
coffee table we ate all our meals at,
hunched over. We used placemats to protect
the surface we already scuffed to shit.
It was a wedding gift from your late mother;
the table before had been laminate
with a broken leg we glued back on
(it still wobbled). I didn’t think I’d ever
miss our scrappy start, our cobbled future.
But cut to seven years and we’ve moved
beyond necessity and into choice.
Had you known we couldn’t eat
without the table, you said, you wouldn’t
have agreed to this new couch and
Chunk Beast’s subsequent cellar exile—
even though it’s rejoined the matching
mini-chunker end tables. You behave as if
you miss the biyearly trips with your siblings
and Mom shuttling us around the sites
in her minivan when I know you better.
You don’t want to let those pieces go and I get it;
I still can’t bring myself to delete Mom’s
number from my cell, or the voicemail
saved of her singing “Happy Birthday.”
Our dining room table’s always been junk-
mail-and-laundry-central and that’s not worth
changing when it’s only ever us in this house,
hollering at one another from separate
rooms to grab the other’s attention.
But when we are together, laughing
at reruns of Modern Family
we’ve seen enough times to quote,
it’s dawning on me
that we’re not meant to see ourselves
as the kids in the story anymore.
~
Cassandra Caverhill is a Canadian-American poet and editor. She is the author of the chapbook Mayflies (Finishing Line Press) and a winner of the 2021 AWP Intro Journals Award. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Last Resort Literary Review, Atticus Review, Reed Magazine, Into the Void, and The Windsor Review. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More at www.cassandracaverhill.com.