Bags of Bags

by Zebulon Huset

Zoran Borojevic

The junk drawer tried to teach us minimalism as 90s kids, but it failed. Drawer? By my thirties I needed a closet for my plastic bags filled with plastic bags. I snuck carloads of them to dumpsters when it overflowed, but somehow while I was at work they returned, or the remaining few multiplied, grew larger like koi trying to fill the space. Tumbleweeds of compartmentalization on the consumerism treadmill. I haven’t given up, now the pruning is merely prevention, like rodents whose teeth never stop growing must chew up our crap to keep them from piercing up through their skulls. There’s always a seed crystal ready to replicate itself. The mother-soup bags. It’s not like the bags of bags were precious, but I dreamed better when I knew they were safe. I could protect them. If I could protect anything, maybe it is a sign. Accretion makes a hoarder of me, and it doesn’t know I know, but I’ve caught my clock shedding minutes while I sleep as though it could balance the excess with less time.

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Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest, and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Atlanta Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. He is an advocate of writing exercises and prompts and edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine.