The Lost Museum

The brain is a small volunteer
in the museum of forgotten thoughts.
She works in the vast archives
trimming dried edges
off stacks of discarded pages
with a pair of antique shears.

She peeks out the window
at the unmarked crates
the museum never stops acquiring.
Tiny caskets wait to be filled
with what’s judged worth preserving,
then sealed and shelved to wait again
for the day their contents may
re-emerge as treasure.

Unfathomable amounts of stuff—
impossible to recall what gets lost.
The brain knows she knows so little.
She’s been told there’s only room for so much.

The mouth of the shears squeaks closed.
The mouth of the shears squeaks open.
Words, pieces of words, struck senseless—
the alphabet semi-recognizable—
Together, the words let out one
soft, resolute syllable—“crush,” or maybe “slush”—
a cry of desolation in a lost tongue.

Curls of paper cling together
like locks of hair as they fall to the floor,
thoughts unthought to be swept away.
One stray drifts into view:
“The indiscernible is the hardest to lose.”
The reverse is blank.

The brain thinks on this trinket
for days on end. Perhaps
it’s been waiting for her
to question it back to life,
to argue it between the covers
of a necessary book. She smooths
this snippet of paper till its ink
becomes part of her.

Sometimes, the brain is a greedy collector,
a sleepless believer in keeping it all.
Sometimes, when no one is watching,
she slips a page or two
into her hidden pockets.
This is why she’s here,
to save what can be saved,
to multiply the clutter into completion.

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Susan Cronin (she/her) earned an MFA in poetry from the New School. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as LIGEIA, Southwest Review, A-Minor, Nashville Review, DMQ Review, Gingerbread House, and Josephine Quarterly.