David P. Miller

Desk

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

‍ ‍after “Vest” by Jane Hirshfield

My desk has a drawer with my late mother’s monogrammed calculator, a paper clip shaped like a dolphin, Things to Do heading a pad with nothing written.

Another holds a slide rule and enough staples to last beyond my feet-first exit.

Behind old check registers, a black box with Oblique Strategies stamped in gold and its card deck of provocations: “Is there something missing?”

My desk as anthology, as VR headset.

A drawer with two origami boxes: my warmup girlfriend’s sudden jump onto my lap, my future ex-wife’s tackling me at the steering wheel. The push of four lips, two tongues.

Stuck-open drawer with two compartments: my father’s death day in one. In the other, my work life’s end three days later.

Drawer with my index fingertip pressing my first piano lesson’s middle C.

The Milan Duomo’s blazing roof: a drawer to open when hands rub hands in winter.

Catalogs and handouts from galleries and museums: the hours I stood inside Sea Sky Smoke, Mega Cities Asia.

My wife’s entire high school art room, her Byzantine Madonna and Child in oils. She too, seventeen in a smeared smock.

Drawer with my second reply to her personal ads, beneath other drawers, multiplying, fruit of the auspicious coincidence she wrote for.

Desk as Escher home movie.

Two concert halls of Bach: first St. Matthew Passion, first Art of Fugue, my sound-saturated teen body still in those drawers.

Drawer with the shower I sobbed in when my twenties turned real, the water weeping for fear.

Watson and the Shark and Surrounded Islands. Yes Yoko Ono above Rouen Cathedral.

A drawer with the final sentence my mother tried to speak to me and could not finish. This opens by itself.

Sunset sliding from Mount Norwottuck’s forehead.

Boise River polished with sunset.

Twin drawers of experimental theater. The Manhattan Project’s Alice in Wonderland, its six bodies and bare stage. Me there, motionless viewer. The Open Theater’s Terminal chanting The judgement of your life is your life.

Unopened drawer with a memo stating which of us two will bury the other. Hidden inside another drawer I don’t search for.

Drawer holding my father’s father’s garage, deer roped to the car, its eyes.

Drawer with my mother’s parents’ raspberry bushes, those rare red-tanged breakfasts. Her father’s carved woolly mammoth.

My desk as a mute, patient animal.

𐫱𐫱𐫱

David P. Miller’s collection, Bend in the Stair, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. Nixes Mate Books published his Sprawled Asleep in 2019. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Reed Magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician, Tar River Poetry, Cherry Tree, Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, The Disappointed Housewife, and Blood+Honey, among other journals. In 2025, David received a Tanne Foundation award. He is a member of the New England Poetry Club’s Board of Directors. David is also a member of Boston’s Jamaica Pond Poets and co-directs their Chapter and Verse literary reading series.