The Salt Bags

I went to the garage to find my sled

while the rest of the house was tucked in bed.

Behind the bags of coarse rock salt,

I found the truth of the whole adult fault.

There was the paper with the velvet sheen,

the same bright red I’d already seen

under the tree with a tag from the Pole,

a manufactured lie for a nine-year-old soul.

I went back inside to the kitchen chair

and looked at the snack we’d left sitting there.

A half-eaten carrot, withered and brown,

where the magic of the world had let me down.