What else will be taken away?
Will it disappear like my rattan doll buggy
with the isinglass windows in the bonnet,
like mail delivery on the last Sunday before Christmas,
like all my Oz books stored in an attic
that no longer exists, like the stuffed hawk
that watched over them, like my wind-up elephant
covered in yellow velvet skin — a mechanical
wonder with legs, tail, trunk and ears that moved
on its journey across the living room floor,
like all the wading pools, like conductors taking
your tickets on city trains, like coal bins
in every basement on the block, like delivery men
at dawn leaving their crates filled with butter, cheese
and milk in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
and fluted paper tops, like miniature glass cream pitchers
in every restaurant, like all the spools of black thread
I can never find when I need one, like the mystery
of answering a phone with no caller I.D., like my father
phoning to give his orchard report —
three more kumquats appeared —
like my brother’s bottle of Vitalis Hair Tonic,
like Pluto — still out there in the galaxy spinning as
always, trying to play the game and keep up
with its bigger siblings, re-dubbed
a dwarf planet. Everything is in the name.

Karen Loeb’s poems and stories have appeared recently in Big City Lit, Halfway Down the Stairs, Bramble, Foreign Literary Journal, and Muddy River Poetry Review. Her work has won the fiction and poetry contests in Wisconsin People and Ideas. She was the City of Eau Claire’s writer-in-residence from 2018 to 2020. For more of her writing, search for her name at VolumeOne.org.