Keli Osborn
Remainders
Last night’s apparent host clink-clinks green
and amber bottles to a fat bin in the bleary zone
of stained fences, bicycle parts, thin yards dotted
by plastic cups that will never decay.
His college bookstore sells T-shirts, soy latté-to-go.
Double-doors open to ear buds and USB cables, packets
of salty peanuts: vestibule of untidy stacks, yellow stickers
slapping spines of fiction, history, surplus science.
In the inky stream of graffiti, disruption isn’t the red
slash through a president’s name or inscrutable marks
on utility boxes. What demands pause is a bland wall
anointed: “No such thing as a life that’s better than yours.”
[Lyric: J. Cole, Love Yourz (2014 Forest Hills Drive)]
Keli Osborn‘s poems have appeared in Timberline Review, The Fourth River, San Pedro River Review, KYSO, The Quotable, Folio, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies The Absence of Something Specified (CreateSpace, 2016), All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood ( Sage Hill Press, 2016), Dona Nobis Pacem (Lane Literary Guild, 2006) and How to Love Everything (CreateSpace, 2015). She lives and writes in Eugene, Oregon, where she co-coordinates the Windfall Reading Series and work with community organizations.
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