Every time I lift the lid
on the bin by the stairs
to the units above,
and upend my basket
of recyclables,
I hear the voice
of my ex-husband’s lover.

At a dinner party,
months before I learned
her real role in our lives,
I turned to her amid
the laughter and the clinking,
and asked if she found
she produced a lot of trash.

Such a strange question,
she must have thought.
No wonder he’s sleeping with me.
But was it so strange?
I threw so much away,
night after night, bag after bag,
despite my efforts to compost,
to reduce, reuse, recycle.
Still so much
bore no little raised triangle;
no arrows chasing
an infinity of tails.

My husband’s lover considered
my question. Trash?
A lot of trash?
She looked up and to the side.
Trash?, she said a third time,
as if stalling, or puzzling out
a mispronounced
word. No, she said, finally.
but a lot of recycling.
So much recycling.

She hunched
just slightly, her shoulders
cupping her heart.
I thought I knew her shame.
I too felt I ought to be reducing
rather than re-using.

Halina Duraj’s poetry has been published in Bat City Review, Cimarron Review, and the Poets of the American West anthology.