chicken-scratched half-poems

I have beloved scraps—grocery store receipts, post-it notes, junk mail, irrelevant business cards—that are home to chicken-scratched half-poems written with dying pens at stoplights, in checkout lines, in the kitchen while stirring barley into the soup. Later, I find them sandwiched between diapers and sticky, half-eaten granola bars in the bottom of my purse; I find them in pockets; I find them tucked into cookbooks like pressed flowers. I read them and, like stumbling upon a faded photograph of a long-ago lover, my breath catches; I can almost touch it, that lost beauty. But more immediate miracles need tending: the baby cries to be nursed, the toddler needs his boo boo kissed, dinner must come out of the oven. Then later, after the children have gone to bed, I'm putting leftovers in the fridge, muttering to myself, wondering if it is even possible to resurrect bygone almost-poems, and the season’s first strawberries, red and decadent, call out from the shelf, begging to be rinsed, admired, tasted.