The Customer Service Representative

The world is a catastrophe/
Here, too, on the electron level of this house:

calamity/
Yet I’ve been asked to hold up the world.

Set a table and chairs for it.
Child. Husband.
The cats without homes.

It is meaningful/
I’m told.
Some days a lie.
Others, a broken coffee cup.

I look down at the space between my feet
and the floor
where the stepstool’s been kicked away.

It’s a wonder I can stay afloat
without collapsing.

But you are the voice on the phone 
for the small thing.

The obstruction in the vacuum 
that prevents the roller spinning.

Take the canister apart from the motor.
Blow your breath through the tube as if playing the trumpet.
There, a small chunk of wood spits out.

We sometimes suck in what we can’t release.
Isn’t that what you said?
Your voice puts a solid board beneath my body.

I want to make myself molecular,
till I land on your lap,
and ask to curl myself there, very small.

Until you say
Yes, just like that.

CHRISTY PRAHL

Christy Prahl’s debut collection, We Are Reckless, is forthcoming this fall from Cornerstone Press. A Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Penn Review, Salt Hill Journal, and other publications. She has held residencies at both Ragdale and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow.