"Tchotchkes" by Judith Terzi

Tchotchkes

I am no defector from the Moscow Circus,
but I'm praying for toilet tissue. Shelves
half-bare as I stand here stunned like when

Robin Williams stands in a coffee aisle
in the movie Moscow on the Hudson,
gobsmacked by American supermarket

plethora. Hasn't the coin flipped to the other
side? Now a stranger points to a bottom
shelf. "Don't buy that brand!" she warns me.

"It leaves little bits of tissue — there." She
points again. This scene just before lockdown,
masks, gloves, swabs . . . Before Sunday's

family birthday Zoom. I put on my Santa Fe
Indian Market turquoise earrings, removed
my sweats, put on a sundress. I was counting

on a chat with some I hadn't seen in a while.
I found loud music instead. Wild jumping,
bare baby bottom, diaper changing. A Costco

chocolate cake with twenty-one candles. Sure,
we sang, let them eat cake. I wish I could say
someone noticed my lip gloss or how long

my hair had grown since chemo ended last
year, my stark white hair piled on top of my
head, hair grown in thicker than before.

Or that my kitchen sparkled like the one
in MSNBC interviews. White, luminous
kitchen with a bowl of fruit arranged

on the counter — oranges and apples
replaced by apricots and nectarines as
the months have rolled by, and spring

has switched to summer. A white orchid
has morphed into a sunflower, and three
ceramic (probably) squirrels surround

a stubby cactus. Don't you love these
intimate settings despite the back story,
the tragedy you can forget for a moment

eyeing the tchotchkes — the clay giraffes
and hippos, the seashells, Inuit bears, and
miniature ships — in between the combed

or unread tomes of the imagined or
unimaginable scripts? New oeuvres keep
slipping in next to the old — rhythmically,

naturally gliding in next to their own kind,
who shelter them, make them feel at home.
Who knows when their authors will no

longer have to sit or stand next to a lone
pineapple on a granite counter or a fiddle
leaf fig? Or a light mahogany baby grand.

Judith terzi

Author of Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay Press, 2018) as well as of five chapbooks, including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By and Casbah (Kattywompus Press, 2014), Terzi's poems have appeared in a wide array of journals and anthologies. Her poetry has been read on BBC Radio 3 and nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Net and Web. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and taught high-school French for many years, as well as French and English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria. Read more work at sharingtabouli.com.

Headshot: Judith Terzi

Photo Credit: Staff