hobby horses

  What do I do with all of these things

  which were never mine? Your dirty knees,

  bubblegum smile. I was listening

  to daddy’s baritone wind pipes

  when you captured the tattered tabby cat,

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  held her pumpkin body under pale bedsheets

  the color of plastic skeleton bones and daddy’s pillow.

  Buck tooth smile, ladybug freckles, gecko tails:

  you thought they wouldn’t run, abandon their

  ends. Shoe strings, your over read picture book,

  paint under your arms, caked in your scarecrow hair.

  Favorite horse, soft like the living room cushions, stiff

  as daddy’s collared shirts and old kitchen dish cloths.

  You dragged that pony everywhere, sucking on one

  glass eye in all these old photographs I tape

  over the windows.

  Old hobby horses, muffling dusty light.