On Garbage

Every day on the back of our ’89 Mitsubishi Galant,
I searched the curbs for precious garbage.

It was the 90s, my parents were scraping by,
and I learned to sharpen this vigilance—
pay attention to what everyone throws away.

Our first three TVs, our first couch,
our first coffee table, its glass crackled, its oak rough,
how I learned to love garbage

because it gave me hope
to rescue what was abandoned,
what was beyond repair.

Eight years old, I was home alone too much.
No story had to end in the dumpster.
I prized even the broken things: the TV sets

with bent antennas, the moth-eaten lace, the paperbacks
dropped in bathwater. Then I learned shame.

What if I had known then what I know now—
that landfills, like churches or streets, have names.

The largest landfills in America have pleasant
ones: Pine Tree Acres, Sunshine Canyon.
And some have terrible names, like Fresh Kills

on Staten Island, once a salt flat, then a tidal strait,
a dump, then finally a park. The trash mounds capped
in clean soil, like snow dressing the loneliness

of summits. All the drawings I wish I’d kept,
the toys I thought I’d outgrown, the aches of girlhood.

I was wrong to think I could let it all go. My mother’s
father was a hoarder, so she loved tearing things up,
throwing them out. She made a carnival of it.

Every day, the crinkling and crushing,
the tossing. Of course she’d raise a daughter
who excels at dumpster diving.

Among the treasures I rummaged in the trash, I found me.