30/30 Day 7: Thrift

Those mornings we rose to the newspaper
splayed across the living room floor, enough

red ink for a murder scene, our mother
poring over classifieds: everything

given was received, sought was found.
Here, a couch made home by wasps

last summer, a canoe portaged a county
too far, our city rivers thick and silted.

Every harvest took planning, the hand-
drawn map pointing the way from one

discarded oasis to the next and, on her
return, the living room became an orphanage

of mis-matched furniture and crooked lamps.
The house was a weakened body after a vital

transfusion––every surface new and flushed
with life, none of it recognizable as our own.