Chore by Austin Alexis

She cleaned her apartment for the lover she would have in the future.  Oh, the windows were streaked, but she had a feeling he would forgive that.  Not so, the dusty windowsills.   She gave them a swipe, felt annoyance at their insistence on collecting soot….  She looked around.  So many rectangles.  A world of angles, multiplying, multiplying.   And a universe of surfaces: flat, clean, dirty, cluttered, lumpy, smooth.  Perpendicular to walls, desk surfaces, table surfaces, shelf surfaces, chair surfaces, counter surfaces jutted out like hands in a perpetual state of offering.  And the walls themselves: all that verticality.  Looming over her.  Hinting at the monumental, and rightly so.   As she tidied her apartment over a series of days, eventually her residence became, in her eyes, a monument to her, by her, for her--with or without a lover.    

Author bits: 

Austin Alexis has been published in Paterson Literary Review, Lips, The Journal, Clockwise Cat, Danse Macabre and elsewhere.  His chapbook, Lovers & Drag Queens (Poets Wear Prada Press), was a Small Press Review "Pick of the Month" and contains a Pushcart Prize nominated poem.  He received a Vermont Studio Center artist grant and residency.