reasonable
a starter home
with kitchen and bathrooms redone,
six percent down
an unlocked car
an affordable five-bedroom
in a neighborhood
with good schools
a crowded floor
in a stumbled-upon squat
a townhouse
just a five-minute stroll
from the subway
a cot in a shelter
that comes with a breakfast
and meant-to-be caring advice
a renovated loft
with a lease
of negotiable length
a hanging park bench
swaying beneath its narrow roof
a ninth-floor coop
with a river view,
new elevator installed this year
a cardboard encampment
beneath an overpass
an independent living apartment
with a reasonable buy-in
a rug rolled out
in a drainage tunnel
a fifteen-acre wooded lot
with a sandy beach
a tent
some charity
wanted to give away
a timeshare
in the mountains
a stretch of pavement
occupied by no one else
small
You wouldn’t call
the small the little
of the back, hollow
not what you thought
when you returned to wonder
about the Rokeby Venus,
depression not the word
for what you feel
when your thumbs rub
your husband’s lower spine,
and, now that you’ve come back
to bed with your coffee
and found him half asleep,
you take a couple of sips
before testing how well
the cup sits in that saucer.
wrack
Wreck
—changing lanes,
the 18-wheeler sideswipes
a church bus, the death count
increasing with each news report,
the accident largely forgotten
by the weekend—
lacks the finality
of wrack, wrack denoting
a catastrophe so utter
—overpasses collapsed, families
turned treacherous, the sun dimmed
for months, faith in life gone—
we’re apt to downplay the word
as no more than redundant
by alliterating it with “ruin.”