She used it to coax recalcitrant children
back to sleep in the August dark,
or figure out how to mend a marriage
going bad in the next bedroom over.

Through those trying nights,
he prayed over how to pay the bills
before the bank foreclosed
on what was left of this house,

this land. This old chair saw it all.
These runners cut from cherry
wood by someone her grandfather
must have known, the dowels shaped

by hand to fit snug like the family
photographs placed cheek-to-jowl
on the downstairs, fireplace mantel.
They say that the arms are always

the first to show its age and these
are worn smooth with worry,
pocked-marked by cigarette burns

when he would nod off to reruns
on late night TV, forgetting to flick
the ashes, stub out the butts, and then
be jolted awake by the crick in his neck.

And she, never quite dreaming
how their lives might be assigned
a lot number to be shouted out,
offered up, to the highest bidder.

# # #

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. He is a recipient of the Cincinnati Post-Corbett Foundation Award for Literature and a semi-finalist for the Emily Dickinson Society Award. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in, Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Ten Years of Dos Madres Press.