Lost Blossom

Every day we live we feed
a little on the misfortunes
of others: underpaid food

service workers, vet-techs-
turned-retail-employees,
the work people we need

stuff from. No amount
of ethical decisionmaking
can save us from it, either—

it seems built into the conditions
of finitude & expediency,
an overwhelming but blurry fact

like how the ideal situation
for a collector of some vintage thing’d be
if someone got the thing as a gift

they didn’t want & never opened,
so they let it sit & not-rot for years
in a corner of their basement,

totally unused.