“What a Spectacle” by Cheryl Spinner

My glasses are dirty, you know.
Dirty
Dirty
Dirty.
I said listen, I know very well how dirty they’ve gotten.
Don’t tell me. I know.
The kind of dirty that can’t be gotten out.
They’re goners.
They’re smudged and old
And oily
And forgotten.
But I remember the days when they were new
And horn-rimmed
And snazzy.
I remember when
And I like them very much.
I will keep those good-for-nothing spectacles
Because I knew them well one time
When they were new and horn-rimmed.  


Cheryl Spinner currently lives in Durham, N.C., where she is a doctoral student in the English Department at Duke University. She received her Master's Degree in English at Georgetown University in the spring of 2010. A native of Queens, N.Y., her writing intertwines yiddishe kopf with a certain kind of New Yawk flair. You can follow her research blog at electricladieszap.wordpress.com.