"Wedding Day in a Landfill" by Ahreeda Ryter

There was once a man
who dropped off 40 pounds
of dead Tambaqui
& an old IBM keyboard.
A Korean palm reader
came by with golf clubs
& an unused Electrolux,
which I gave to my mother
for her 75th birthday.

Last week a little girl
ran off with a bag
of naked Barbie dolls.
A gang of boys
grabbed a microwave,
a painting of the Sphinx,
& a VHS tape
of Howard Stern’s Private Parts.

I once found a bicycle chain
snaked inside a toilet bowl,
a pair of water skis I sold
for 60 bucks on eBay,
600 holographic Pokémon cards,
soiled sex toys,
& a bag of dog heads.

But here we are, wrists stained
by brown water, brows smeared
with the oil of old tires,
leveling the earth
into a field of gray morning.

I drink in your pearls
& your eyes sing a chorus
to vultures & a sack of onions
somewhere in the distance.
My eyes were scarred
by that box of mannequin hands
I saw last year, but now
they watch your curls glitter,
your dress drag
against dirt. Like that
unopened case of copper tubing
or crate of Chiquita bananas
dumped the other weekend,
we are bruised & ripe for recycling,
the past forever stuck beneath our fingernails.

We are children, old,
we try our own hands at palmistry
to read the appendix of our days,
giving our lives to each other:
the junk, the jewels.

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Ahreeda Ryter’s poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in The Decadent Review, The Bookends Review, Revolute, Eleutheria, LAMP, and other places. Ahreeda teaches at Central Virginia Community College and is the poetry editor for Polis Journal of Literature and Art.