Expired Coupons

Josh Bettinger

After beginning to peel, not having peeled,
a boiled egg over the compost bin

at the speckled sink a handful
of fruit flies lift their possessions of air up and out
from the kitchen noiselessly
and full of an ordinary grace.

I remember a shirt coming off
in sunlight and you were just a perfect
roll of butcher paper
unspooling through and against red leaves.

Driving to work a bumper sticker
reminds me that my father and I
are now at an age where everything I gift him—

knives, jackets, cookbooks—
I am in fact putting on a type of tempered layaway

for me to dramatically interpret later.
Or the inverse a more unhinged turn
and we lose ourselves in how sheets are to be folded,

but they themselves know
they were never fully articulated
by a more active rendition
than the jovial corpse astraddle our silent forms.