Traipsing the Trailer to the Thrift Stores by Sharon Waller Knutson

Our past packed in boxes,
on a maudlin Monday morning
we snake up Seventeenth Street
to Deseret Industries. The gray
building and parking lot
are empty as a mausoleum.
The gate is locked tight.

Google Gal guides us on
Boulevard past the boarded
up buildings where we sipped
fountain sodas in the sixties
on swiveling suede stools
while waiting for a prescription
at the corner drug store.

And the A & W Drive-In
on G street where we
drank root beer
in frosted glass mugs
from bare-legged bunnies
who hopped car to car.
The microphones and trays
still hang from the poles
unused for sixty years.

To the striped and steepled
Salvation Army church
where they still serve soup
to starving strangers.
Sorry, we aren’t taking any
more donations except for food.
Come back in January, the Santa
Claus look-alike tells us.

We google Goodwill
and head on Holmes
where the store stands
next to the Dollar Tree.
We take anything but tires,
mattresses and bed frames,
says the cheerful worker
who hauls away seventy-
five years of our lives.



Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published several poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields by Flutter Press and What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say (to read a book review click here) and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob now available from Kelsay Books. Her work has also appeared in One Art, Mad Swirl, The Drabble, Gleam, Spillwords, Muddy River Poetry Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review and The Song Is…