This Is What Absorption Looks Like

The bag was already through

by the time I shut the door—

dark bloom in the brown paper,

the kind of thing that doesn't ask before

it spreads. I sat there.

The stain reached the seat—

the passenger seat, which belongs to no one.

I didn't wipe it. The heat

of the car, the bag still going,

the paper thinning, going clear.

There's a word for what a thing does

when it takes something in. I know that word. It's near.