cleaning out my bedside drawer
by Matthew Stokdyk
(after graduating from high school so I could move on with my life)
five bobby pins
(one with a blonde hair
still kinked and curled
between its teeth)
an indie cd
(from the coffee house concert
where I kissed that boy;
you shouldn’t have forgiven me)
three ticket stubs
(we took my sister to brave
and she cried
and you cried differently)
an empty plan b
(i should have hidden it better
or trashed it, but something kept me
from throwing it out)
a poem draft
(on crinkled loose leaf
penciled and smudged
and the first to be garbage)
One of five poems originally published in Anatomy of Our Nightstands, a zine curated by Yusi Liu for the Spring 2021 edition of the Little Book Project in Madison. You will note some recurrent themes in the poems, chiefly angst (originating with me) and certain motifs picked up from a 2018 exhibition Yusi held in her home in Madison. It examined, in part, the functions of and associations between domestic spaces and objects (including the impetus for the Little Book: what one might keep in a nightstand that one keeps nowhere else, like contraception, drugs, personal effects, purely utilitarian objects, etc.).