What the Floor Holds

She'd moved everything visible.

Boxes taped and labeled, the plants

distributed among people who'd promised

to keep them alive.

Under the bed: a library book

two years past due, a single sock,

a charging cable coiled in dust

for a phone discontinued in 2019.

I slid a flat box under

and felt the resistance—

not weight exactly. More like the floor

reminding me what gets left

below the level where we pay attention.

I recognized it.

The specific archaeology of inattention,

the way certain things drift

beneath the daily line of accounting

and just wait there.

The cable was still coiled neat.

Ready for a device

that doesn't exist anymore.