Things I’ve Found in Pockets at the Dry Cleaner’s, What August Gives Back to You, Fox Mulder, & After It All It’s All Over
Poetry by Layla Kutschker
Sunlight and Shadow: The Newbury Marshes by Martin Johnson Heade, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
Things I’ve Found in Pockets at the Dry Cleaner’s
Tiny wooden Christmas ornament, lightly broken,
105 dollars cash, American,
Wedding invites,
Funeral cards,
White Bick lighter,
Unlabelled mints, candies, cough drops,
Pills, pens, business cards,
Eggshell,
Spare buttons, thread,
Poorly rolled blunt,
Grocery lists,
Parking passes, receipts,
Boarding passes, drink tickets,
Parking tickets,
Hotel key cards,
Lipstick, perfumes,
Alcohol wipes,
Face cream samples,
Empty hotel shampoo bottle,
Unwrapped granola bar,
Photo-booth print-out picturing two people,
neither of them the person who dropped off the jacket,
Underwear,
Cigarettes,
Spare change,
A sticky note with nothing but a phone number,
Which I returned
just in case.
What August Gives Back to You
In the late summer sickening heat,
The lake recedes back,
Falling over smoothed stones and
Lakeweed glistening from sun rays.
Willow trees bend towards the marsh,
Low hanging branches swaying,
Roots pushing through the air where the water
Carved out the side of the bank.
Families release dogs and kids in the park,
Already sweating through their clothes.
Dogs pad about in muddy waters,
And two kids chase each other through the grass.
And there are many flies,
Where at the edge of the lake,
The water has slumped back, revealing
Sodden lakeweed and a water-logged body.
Fox Mulder
Your bruised and hurt Honda Accord
took you across the country
chasing aliens. It’s wonderful
to have something so reliable
as the dents up and down the doors
from when that rusted out truck
rolled across the lot
into your parked car
in Roswell, New Mexico.
You were chasing after an ideal of your childhood
that never was. It’s not real
and you know this.
You know this.
It’s all because you woke up once
at nine in the morning to the sound
of your parents laughing and the sun
lighting up the hardwood floor
like it’s brilliance will prove
your life used to be something
more.
It was one moment, one
memory that everything has to live up to.
But you can’t
wake up
that morning
ever
again.
So you drove
to Kecksburg, Pennsylvania
and awake all night,
you looked to the sky. You
waited, laying on the hood of
your car, your childhood home.
The one that you remember
lovelier than it was.
There were no lights in the sky.
There was just a buzz
from the bugs that hung
on your windshield.
You wanted to lose nine minutes.
You wanted to see the world’s end.
You wanted to live against time.
You wanted to be afforded the respect of
closure, answers. A requiem
for your mis-remembered memories.
You wanted something impossible,
but you could hold in your hands
and say, here it is, I found it.
But all you get is the scratches
on your license plate from backing
up into the curb
in Aurora, Texas.
But After It All It’s All Over
My survey in English literature professor is retiring this year
I didn’t say a word in that class except, once, “Kitty”
When she couldn’t remember
The second youngest Bennet sister.
And on the last day
We went over the final passages of Mrs. Dalloway
And she said we’re all connected.
And there she was.
All connected.
Peter Walsh
Quite loved her, Mrs. Dalloway, but it doesn’t matter,
It doesn’t matter.
But they’re all connected. And I thought
I might cry.
And my professor clasped her hands and said thank you.
And I left through the side without saying good-bye,
Because a crowd of students all hurried to the front
To wish her a happy retirement,
And I thought that she surely wouldn’t remember me enough
To care that I’d been there to say good-bye.
I went down the hall and to the washrooms,
So then when I left, I walked past the classroom again.
And I looked in to see
And she was there still in the empty room.
And behind me and around me was all the clamour of students walking
Between classes, between moments, on their way
Out into their expansive lives
And in the calm classroom, alone,
There she was, quite quietly, putting away her things.
L Robertson Kutschker is a poet, writer, and fourth-year University student in the Bachelor of Arts program at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. When she is not writing, she can be found hanging out with her cat, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or attempting a new artistic endeavour, while ignoring all the works-in-progress. instagram: robertsonkutschker