By Sofía Méndez
The Grvy’s Poem of the Month is a standing appointment: one poem, on the first of the month, chosen for the season we’re actually in. We begin with October, the month that inventories everything.
October Inventory
Count the light first. There is less of it,
and what remains is gold and doesn’t stay.
Count the chairs on the porch. Two.
One has been empty long enough
to hold leaves like an offering bowl.
Count the names in the phone
that would not know if you went quiet.
Count the ones that would. Use one hand.
Count the sweaters. Count the moths
that found them anyway, small accountants
of everything we swore we’d protect.
Count the apologies owed, the ones delivered,
the ones still earning interest in the dark.
Count the passwords. Eighty-one.
Eighty-one locked doors in a burning house
and you standing in the middle of it,
holding all the keys, perfectly safe,
completely alone with the smoke.
Count the dead. They do not mind.
They have been counted before and found
that being remembered is a kind of rent
the living pay in October, in full,
in advance, for the whole winter.
Then count what the year, in its mercy, left:
a song your father played. A table. A door
that still opens from the inside.
One voice that answers when you call out
in the apartment at night —
and be careful, be very careful, which voice you count.
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