John Erhardt
No Gift

We’ve hired a consultant to help with the imagining.
It’s this process we find most difficult.  This room
is impossible to keep swept.
This room is furnished with empty handbags.

He’s left us with
a subscription to the orphanage’s newsletter,
a fedora stuffed with expired coupons,
an anthology of the world’s greatest consoling one-liners.

He’s begun a halfway house in our garage
for recovering telemarketers.
He has organized a standing-room only meeting
of the Ugly Wives Club.
At night, he writes of constellations from his basement.

This is what I’ve been talking about, God.

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