Unpacking

Photo from Sankarshansen's Wikimedia page.

It’s a return trip, so the bag’s full of dirty
laundry, and tchotchkes, and one layer entirely
uncertain: an origami of jotted notes, dog-eared
leaves torn from a local rag, a drying pomegranate
flower on a sprig I plucked before I flew home.

Like an old vaudeville joke, the space inside the case
is larger than it seems from the outside. It also doesn’t
smell like socks now—there’s a moment when I turn,
and the room fills with a faint smell of fresh-cut grass.

I’m thinking about beacons: web beacons, those tiny
whisperers that hop our trains of thought as we roam
from site to site, and harbor buoys, a very different
sort of beacon, when my fingers find I’d missed a
pocket. Inside it, a contract: a few months’ more light.