Christian Cacibauda
Christian Cacibauda is an itinerant poet and writer. A Native of Reno, he was educated there at the University of Nevada, and at the Universidad del País Vasco, San Sebastián, Spain. His work has appeared in Red Rock Review and Brushfire Literature & Arts Journal. He lives in Beijing.
Storage Unit
So like opening your own tomb—
the things you’d carry to the grave
were you a pharaoh or a king.
The warehouse around you so vast,
so empty at this hour,
the bolt you shoot back rings
like thunder. The tin door groans.
Here lies a life in artifacts
you paid for once, forgot,
and now unearth again: the queen-
sized mattress, box spring, frame,
the linens, luggage, glassware, names
you can’t recall or trace scrawled
in old address books, the hand—
your own—indecipherable as hieroglyphs.
All of it familiar, all in your name,
somehow belonging to an age
that time forgot—to someone else.
It’s always someone else. Always
someone else collects the dross
we leave behind, catalogues
each dusty box, and loads a rented truck—
half expecting, half afraid
to find a dark-age knight in rusting armor
or organs in canopic jars. No luck.
The heart that drove you here still beats.
Only the rhythm has changed.
There’s something primal in it now—
the pulse of drumbeats underneath the moon,
blood offered to the sun, or the prayer intoned
(but not inscribed) above the door,
more oath than warning or curse:
To those in search
of treasures-hard-to-find, beware—
Whosoever enters here
shall know me by his ghosts.
©2020 West Trade Review
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