Tuesday poem #175 : Sonnet L'Abbé : LX

Local Ikeas outfit houses with alsvik faucets, smaka cheese cutters, botne wardrobes, spathiphyllum potted plants, klubbo coffee tables, lindsdal handles and knobs, norreskog odorous candles, format cabinet lights, nutid exhaust hoods, and kajsa sten duvet covers. Their blue and yellow architectures are harbingers of indistinguishable places with stylish coordinates, with irreproachably organized closets. Before Ikea’s consequential interior imperialism, loveseats were forever. Now temporary is how decorators do contemporary condo. Somnat cribs, svit cutlery, koncis steel roasting pans, fantast meat thermometers, aina cushions, fläckig white colanders and bowls, tomat spray bottles, titta djur finger puppets, groggy corkscrews and heat trivets go with betydlig and hugad curtain rods, alve drawer units, fredde computer workstations, kritter children’s chairs, liatorp bookcases and glass cabinets, and thorine polyester hedgehog pillows. We’re years post-Fight Club and still they send me the catalog, that seductive document, that porn of Swedish furnishings; my gift card props the INGKA Foundation up; their glossy merch doth me transfix. The careful layout of retail showrooms is contrived to convey you through a long, winding, deliberate groove, counterclockwise, past shelves and partitions, along slow aisles of cheap Scandinavian beauty, past bins and rows of textiles and fashion kitchenware. The sardonic market for medium density fibreboard must be one of nature’s truths; what would stand in clothing stands’ thereabouts if not for this basic home accessory itch? When customizing your window treatment, don’t you dwell on cost like any customer? I’ve spent more time on this than I meant to. I should put this item away. I never had a taste for Swedish meatballs until I needed a nightstand; but o! primary injustice! when – godlike—they wouldn’t rethink, despite my girlish dissent, the cruel height limit of småland.

Dr. Sonnet L'Abbé, is a poet, essayist and public speaker. The author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Relief and Killarnoe, L'Abbé was the editor of Best Canadian Poetry 2014 and the 2015 Edna Staebler Writer in Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University. She has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia - Okanagan and at the University of Toronto's School of Continuing Studies. Dr. L'Abbé currently teaches creative writing and English at Vancouver Island University. The poem included in Dusie is an erasure-by-crowding from her current project, Sonnet's Shakespeare, in which L'Abbé overwrites or "colonizes" all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan