Landlords
The landlord remarks, as he is fixing the toilet,
the toilet is a hardy one, reliable—not like
those other toilets! he says. I think he means
the toilets made in China. Well, wherever the toilet
I'm flushing is from, it sucks: or doesn't. I have
to flush twice to make a normal shit with toilet paper (surely
the reader is not surprised to discover I keep my ass clean)
go all the way down the drain. The shit isn't ever
the problem; it's the paper. What does our landlord
have to say about that? what does yours? Somewhere
in there, in the toilet, there's a lesson to be learned. But where?
the toilet is a hardy one, reliable—not like
those other toilets! he says. I think he means
the toilets made in China. Well, wherever the toilet
I'm flushing is from, it sucks: or doesn't. I have
to flush twice to make a normal shit with toilet paper (surely
the reader is not surprised to discover I keep my ass clean)
go all the way down the drain. The shit isn't ever
the problem; it's the paper. What does our landlord
have to say about that? what does yours? Somewhere
in there, in the toilet, there's a lesson to be learned. But where?
David W. Pritchard is a poet and a scholar, but not a poet-scholar. He is the coauthor of two chapbooks: More Fresh Air(with Greg Purcell) and Impropria Persona (with Kay Gabriel). Recent writings in verse and prose can be found in or are forthcoming from Bylines, Tripwire, The RS500, Lambda Literary’s poetry spotlight, and Jacket2. David lives in Western Massachusetts, where he is working on a dissertation about New Narrative and the poetics of revolutionary transition.