The Poet’s Attic by Elisa L. Everts

​The Poet’s Attic  
​
i.
damaged poems wedged into
umbrella holders, broken lines like
displaced umbrella spokes
protruding from their
moldering barrels.
half developed images, some in
sepia, some in color, dangle from
the buckling walls. mangled
stanzas stuffed into musty
couch cushions, discarded
metaphors, mixed or maimed,
scattered across the floor like
the steel wool used to keep the
rats out.
 
rags of rhymes overflow
misshapen cardboard boxes,
the bits of (text)ile, now of no use
save perhaps for patching,
or perhaps for polishing the
poems of the present.
assonance and consonance
and glittery alliteration, arranged in
a delicate gold filigree, seem to
have had their intricacies hammered
out of shape by some Philistine
phantom of substance wielding
some blunt instrument of phonetic
destruction, deformed and distorted
bits of sound now scattered about
like decrepit dust bunnies.
 
ii.
ardent poems to old lovers
disintegrate like ash in dusty drawers
and verses in vases conveying
shocking revelations which never
reached their destination, addressed
to persons now deceased.
angry poems hidden in ceramics
that they might not scorch everything
they touch like cigarette burns to
a vinyl couch. sentimental poems
sewn up in secret pockets of suits that
slump in a pile of clothes like the
sad and sloping shoulders of a 
homeless person who has not known 
hope in many moons. and here and 
there the odd ode to joy, like scattered 
fragments of stained glass, the 
remnants of a happiness long expired.
 
iii.
is there no resurrection for bygone
poems, left by the wayside of our
wandering, wondering wills?
 
will these bits of poems ever age
themselves into the sweetness of a
fine cask of wine? are they like raisins
and bits of stems, leftovers lying by
which can do nothing more than
shrivel and ultimately turn into dust?
 
or are they more like precious gems
and findings of gold and silver, waiting
patiently for the expert jeweler to
fuse them into the perfect place in
the perfect piece, poetic ornaments
as elegant as they are eloquent . . .
 
So much depends on the owner of
this attic.

​

Elisa L. Everts holds a Ph.D. in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University, where she received a four-year fellowship. Her poetry, published or forthcoming in Lavender Review, Misfit Magazine, Bards Against Hunger, NOVA Bards and elsewhere, is driven by her passion for human interaction She is the author of two seminal academic articles about family humor style and blind/sighted interaction, published by Mouton and Georgetown University Press. She has also just finished a children’s chapter book tentatively titled, “This Little Pig is Family.” Elisa writes and teaches near Washington, DC.

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