Thrush Poetry Journal
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Sheila Nickerson 

The Consignment Shop

We bring in two lamps no longer

wanted and take away another.



Perhaps this is heaven:  a second-hand

shop where we can make exchanges

and come back as something else.



At the door we are checked in,

evaluated, committed to a contract,

and then we wait:  perhaps

here by the child’s desk,

or  there, by the glass table,

the one with gold candlesticks

and yellow satin flowers in a vase.



There are little rooms and large,

all arranged by color and like kind

where we are silently displayed

to our advantage.



Perhaps if someone still alive

remembers us, a light shines

and we are chosen, taken back

into that other world we knew,

once more a different shape,

once more learning how to be.




Sheila Nickerson (Bellingham, Washington) is a former Poet Laureate of Alaska.  Her most recent title, nonfiction, is Harnessed to the Pole: Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic, 1853-1909 (University of Alaska Press, 2014)




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