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      September 20, 2019The PurseStephanie A. Hart

      Just dump it,
      she said
      to herself. It’s
      the only way.
      She had
      ten minutes,
       
      ten minutes
      after four years
      of rushing:
      work—diaper—home—dinner—bath—doctor.
      Now
      was the moment
       
      to clean her purse.
       
      The purple
      matchbox car
      hit the table
      hardest.
      Flanked by bits
      of crayon
      and straw wrappers,
      errant pencil tips
      and battered
      baby barrettes were
      the sweaty remains
      of the morning’s
      pre pre-K
      peanut butter
      on pumpernickel
      and
      a nearly empty,
      ink-stained bottle
      of hand sanitizer.
      Nothing was hers.
       
      Nothing.
       
      Not the
      crumpled bill given
      to her daughter
      and then jammed
      into the purse
      to “keep it safe.”
      Not the
      spare Spiderman socks.
      Not even, really,
      the sapphire
      set in gold,
      an heirloom
      from her mother-in-law,
      she had removed
      when she learned
      how easily
      fine hair catches
      in filigree.
       
      And
      the blue book.
      What was that?
      It wasn’t
      a child’s book.
      An address book?
      No.
      A passport?
      Yes.
      An unmarked passport.
      A slim, plain blue
      rectangle opening
      from the bottom
      containing
      no photo,
      no stamps,
      no identifying marks.
      Yes.
       
      This was hers.

      from #64 - Summer 2019

      Stephanie A. Hart

      “I write poetry because I can’t stop myself. In every mundane action or interaction, we can find insight into ourselves or human nature or the world around us, if we take a moment to observe. Poetry gives me that moment. I wrote ‘The Purse’ when I challenged my workshop students to write a poem featuring a group of randomly selected mundane objects set together on the table in front of us, including a peanut butter sandwich which I had found in my purse wrapped in a ragged, brown paper towel and pulled apart to lie open-faced and gooey in our make-shift still life. ‘What happened to the peanut butter on pumpernickel?’ asked two of my students when I ran into them at lunch in the dining hall. I ate it.”

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