Al Ortolani

A Collection of Sticks

Every stick of furniture in his house
has come from someone else’s matching set.
The collector recalls with pride where
each piece came from, garage sale,
farm auction, dumpster,
a break up, a foreclosure, a death.
He owns what was important once,
now cast off, lost in an estate.
In the back drawer of a desk,
he finds a packet of letters,
bound with a rubber band. He spends
the better part of an evening reading
about a woman’s love for a married man.
There was a photograph of a woman
in white gloves. Her smile a moth
on a window screen. 
Nothing postmarked, nothing mailed
that could interrupt a Sunday dinner.

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Al Ortolani is a contributing editor to the Chiron Review. His poems have appeared in Rattle, One Art, and the Pithead Chapel. New York Quarterly Books plans to release his most recent poetry collection, American Watercolor, in early 2027.