"moving day" by Brendan Joyce

Brendan Joyce is an unemployed worker from Cleveland, Ohio, the co-organizer of Grieveland and the author of the collections Love & Solidarity and Character Limit. ​

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moving day

​
this city would be smaller
if cars were illegal
though we’d have to
drag that desk across town
then walk back to grab the mattress

& then again twice for the couch (it’s two pieces)
a new color made from what was once grey
sponging up the light late May rain

I found so much from a few different
decades packing (how can moving be so
many things? as nostalgic
as it is hard as it is reinvigorating)

that blue corduroy snapback from when
the nun took us to sit courtside (before Lebron)
when Eric Snow was about the best
we could get (Zydrunas spit all over your lap)

the Whitney ticket from a first date and
the hospital bracelet from the last

the New York magazine
you gave me a few months after I got sober
with Philip Seymour Hoffman’s dead face on the front

yesterday
while cataloging these morbid kindnesses
I realized this is my seventeenth time moving

last summer (here he goes again) I sat on that porch with you
and watched them build that house.
The day I moved out they had almost finished.​