Robert Fillman
Robert Fillman is the author of House Bird (Terrapin, 2022) and the chapbook November Weather Spell (Main Street Rag, 2019). His next collection, The Melting Point, is forthcoming from Broadstone Books in 2025. Individual poems have appeared in such journals as Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily. He teaches at Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania. Other work can be found at www.robertfillman.com.
Shelf Life
Garbage night, and I am going through
the fridge, tossing expired foods into
the trash, lifting the rotten spinach
and a ledge of lasagna, jabbing
a fork into a cake crust lumped in
crumpled foil, as if scraping loose earth
from a grave. Week-old party dip firms
like the dried sweat of hot summer nights,
that season so far away I had
almost forgotten it was ours. Next,
the yogurt, still good, its silver seal
unbroken, the subtle sheen we’ve come
to depend on in civilized life
turning in my fingers—the fine print,
an ingredient list I stumble
over. What is carmine? I learn that
it’s a bug: a female cochineal
crushed by the millions to pinkify
my wife’s favorite snack. I think of
her hands scooping soil, smoothing clay pots
in the garden, how her touch lingers
in the cool underside of things, how
beneath the surface everything moves
to an end. At night, she would turn in
to me, her body, soft as the scales
of those ribbed insects, her breath almost
as quiet as their deaths. What people
do to stay in love, each sacrifice,
another small, thankless life meant to
be pulverized, dissolved in acid.
This is how we dye. The yogurt cup
returned to the shelf, it’s not ready
to be discarded. It will go bad
though just like us, like the millions of
little red bodies that were crawling
thoughtlessly toward another day.
Even now, the door shut, the fridge hums
its low elegy for what won’t last.
