The mop put its head down,
nosing the floor back and forth.
White hair gone gray with swill, ashamed
to show its face. Skinny body,
then drying on the fence all day
with the longest stare away from here.
Mop
Robert Lunday is the author of Mad Flights (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002), Gnome (Black Sun Lit, 2017), and Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness (University of New Mexico Press, 2023), a hybrid memoir about disappearance selected by Rigoberto Gonzalez as the 2022 winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Award. He lives in Houston, Texas.