I Have Made Enemies
I have made enemies
giving the Tupperware back.
They look away with hurt eyes,
offended, angry,
staring down at the container.
I was supposed to keep it,
it was part of the gift,
or, worse,
it wasn’t part of the gift, not a
thing
at all, like returning
tin foil.
Clearly this shows
what I think of them,
their cheapness, their pettiness,
that they’d want it back.
What if they did want it back,
and I’d kept it?
There’d be this
thing
between us,
for years maybe—”Remember that time she
kept the Tupperware?”
When does a thing stop being a thing?
I still can’t tell—
hope everything we give each other
is treasured
or, at least,
washed and returned.
Midge Goldberg received the 2026 New Criterion Poetry Prize for her newest collection, The Whole Gray Lake’s a Sky, forthcoming in 2027. She lives in Chester, N.H.