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