Kayla knew that the white couch had belonged to a neighbor since Kayla started 3rd grade, so she figured out that her neighbor had owned the couch for 10 years. It was just replaced by newly bought furniture.
Image and text by Kurt Gohde and Kremena Todorova, Discarded project. Fall poem by Jeremy Paden.
- Discarded project
The Place Where Couches Go to Die
By Jeremy Paden
We had a couch for ten years, a new couch,
our first, and our dog claimed that sofa as her bed.
The older she got, the more she chewed her paws and her slobber,
her smell of old, decrepit dog settled into its fabric, its stuffing.
The house reeked of dying dog, but we could not smell it.
We had made love on that couch,
on that couch my wife nursed our children in their first months,
on that couch our dog would curl around our daughter
and the two would nap.
The realtor said the couch was keeping our house from selling,
that no one wanted to walk into a house and smell old dog.
So we did the sensible thing:
drove it to the landfill, a mountain of trash and mud.
We wended our way up the curving road between dump-trucks
and garbage trucks to the summit and rolled the sofa over the edge.
It tumbled end over end once and was stopped by a recliner,
some tires, and a jumble of busted concrete and bricks.
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