by Susan Cossette

In a past life I was a steel four-slice
toaster, random kitchen appliance
relegated to a back corner of
the lime-green Formica counter
standing guard and studying the ceramic sunflower jar
of wooden spoons and rusted spatulas,
notorious for my burnt white toast.

In my next life I was reincarnated
into a front-load stackable washing machine,
married to the matching dryer straddled
above me–always willing to take on those poop-stained
onesies and chartreuse monogrammed bath towels,
until my water inlet valve and drum agitation system gave out.

I prayed to the patron saint of misfit appliances
to become something more evolved and
came back as a vacuum cleaner,
but not just any make or model.
I was an Electrolux canister, the kind
exclusively sold by door-to-door salesmen
in navy pinstriped three-piece polyester suits,
The caboose of me nips the fluffy heeled slippers
of the lady tending her forest-olive shag carpet.
I know it is really me doing her work,
removing the detritus of her life.

I must have done my job because one morning
I woke up as a 90-inch flat screen smart television,
mounted on a bright white bedroom wall in Chelsea,
gazing at the Peloton and Pilates reformer,
out the floor-to-ceiling windows
on the heavenly starlights of New York–
I teach the wisdom of chefs, interior designers,
home renovators and decorators

And I rest

knowing everything is pristine and clean–
Gentrified, purified, deified.

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Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she was awarded the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has poems in the Eunoia Review, Rust and Moth, The New York Quarterly, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthology Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press).