I dust the cloth till knuckles may burn,
Fold creases sharp the way they learn.
No one taught me how to wait,
But I do know how to set a plate.

Each year, I dress the table bare,
As if someone might notice a special type of care.
The kind tucked where no one ever looks,
Between all the spoons and brittle hooks.

I pull the chairs out, just a touch,
Not too inviting, never much.
They say you’re brave, to sit alone.
I say it’s worse to have them phone.

And still I press the linen white,
The wax rings ghosting from last night.
I never blow the candles out,
They die like most things, slow with doubt.

You learn to time the silence well,
To sip from cups that never swell.
They’ll say it slipped, or that they meant,
But silence makes the best cement.

I’m not unloved. Don’t twist the thread.
I just set rooms they don’t call red.
It’s not a scream. It’s just a mark,
like ash on cloth when flames go dark.
So I prepare, as I was taught,
And claim the echo as my spot.
No song, no slice, no box or bow,
Just me, and dust, and what they don’t know.

at the first encounter, i thought, that he stole my mother’s tablecloth,
and called it Great while she turned the flour into bread,

after, i thought, what if they were lovers, and shared the same tablecloth
while my father was sweating in his fields, and she was sipping wine from her grapes
when he wrote songs of despair, as they could not have each other,

i shake away my childish thoughts and doubt even more:
- what if they were traders,

trading the tigers, the bread,
the tyrants, the grim teeth,
the wine fields and hard eyes,
the lamb, the onions,
the hunger and the thirst,
the hours of eating the strawberries
and the blossoms on the great tablecloth.

oh, i am childish,
jealous,
curious, and can not stop the thought of stolen tablecloths:
- what if when sad and lonely he put a spell on my mother?
and used her as a tablecloth for those who never loved, or cried,
and those who never turned the flour into bread.