Issue > Poetry
Jeff Schiff

Jeff Schiff

Jeff Schiff latest volume of poems, Coming Clean, will soon be released by MAMMOTH books. His work has appeared internationally in more than eighty periodicals. He has served on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago since 1987.

Carrying Room To Room

Even as I sit
  to chronicle this last
     dull week in our summer home

domesticity a worn rug
  dissolving my achy feet
     she is carrying room to room

our son/daughter
  thanking me with her stiff roundness
     thanking me for washing a carload of dishes

for gleaming counter tops
  windows glinting
     their obtuse sun from any angle

Eight months
  and I've learned
     we are best

at what we loathe
  Think of the husband
     whose suddenly corpulent wife

insists on nightly love
  to make perfectly sure
     Think also of the champion salesman

who began by dreading his Hoover
  then to make filth his art
     Where once my mop

only found kitchen center
  today I am not satisfied
     on hands and knees

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Jeff Schiff
Carrying Room to Room

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