Lori Jakiela

On Watching Reruns of Marie Kondo’s 2019 Netflix Show
Tidying Up with Marie Kondo in 2025

2019 was a mess, too, remember?
Notre Dame burned and the Amazon
burned and scientists took a picture
of a Black Hole that could swallow
us all.

Today a Harvard scientist says
an alien space probe is on its way.

An MIT scientist says Artificial Intelligence
will go rogue in a couple years
and bring on the latest apocalypse

which seems to surprise people despite
those Terminator movies when Arnold
promised he’d be back, and all those Alien movies
that should have taught us something
useful or at least that in space
no one can hear you scream.

I shop for toilet paper on Amazon
while the Amazon keeps burning
and millionaire Neil Young
goes on singing helpless
helpless into his 80s.

When the earth’s closets overflow with stuff
humans will stash more stuff on Mars.

There are alligators in Pittsburgh’s rivers
not many, but still.

Floods and toppled trees, fires and mudslides.
“The end times,” Aunt Velma says but

Aunt Velma is a Jehovah’s Witness.
She’s been tidying up and dreaming
the end times for years.

“The earth wiped clean,” Aunt Velma says
but she goes on dusting her tiny apartment
and buying knick-knacks, ceramic poodles
with their heads on springs, happy cows
with their heads on springs

all of them nodding, nodding
yes, this is good, yes,
all is as it should be

keeping her company in this space
where Aunt Velma plans on spending
eternity with her fellow believers

which seems crazy, the last
of humanity holed up
in a Pine Sol-ed senior-citizen high rise
in Trafford, Pennsylvania
but I wish them well.

I don’t visit anymore.
I never much liked my aunt
and I like her less now.

My feet hurt.
My knees hurt.
I’m tired and my Starbucks boycott
isn’t holding.

I read too much news.
I listen to too much news.
I worry soon there won’t be any news.

“Time to lighten up!” Marie Kondo’s interpreter
whose name is also Marie says.

The Maries’ voices are bubble wrap
and packing peanuts, promising
safe passage to whatever
challenge comes next.

Marie Kondo’s method is called KonMari
which sounds like the name of a cruise ship
or a bomber plane or a new cyberweapon.

In the KonMari method, what can’t be controlled
in the world can be controlled
in a closet. This
leads to better
mental health, the Maries say.

Time to get out
the trash bags. Extra-large.
Heavy duty.
Biodegradable, if possible.
Better to leave
no trace.

 

The Things You Can’t Remember Become The Things You Can’t Forget

My father-in-law, Charlie, has dementia.
He’s forgotten many things but remembers others. 

What he’s forgotten—his favorite order at restaurants.
The names of salad dressings. The names

of his neighbors. How long
he’s been married. How to work a zipper.

What he remembers—Frank Sinatra, Sinatra’s world
every time we’re together.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Charlie says, then sings.
 “Why don’t we do this more often?”

What he remembers—how a good meal feels 
in his body. Ice cream. Coney Island. Growing up 

in the Bronx, a three-story walk-up. 
His father’s vegetable garden. 

What he remembers—25-cent movies, Superman, 
popcorn with real butter. The rattle of the subway. 

The lights of New York after dark. His nickname, Lemon.
His years of working, feeling useful, feeling loved.

“The mind remembers that which is vivid. The mind remembers
that which is good,” Allen Ginsberg, that beatnik genius, said.

“Life is,” Charlie said to me the other day, pausing
to search for the word, “life.” 

 

It’s something he heard from the birds that speak to him now.
The birds have traveled everywhere. They know things.

Charlie believes birds are angels, messengers.
Keepers of memory.

Maybe they are.
I believe they are.

 

My friend Joe used to get drunk and argue

with inanimate objects. He’d point at an ashtray on the bar
—remember ashtrays?—and say,

“This fucking ashtray will outlive you.
It will outlive me.

This fucking piece of plastic will go on and on
when we’re dead and buried. Fuck you, ashtray!”

And then he’d order another beer and check his reflection
in the mirror over the bar. Then 

he’d order another beer.
And another.

I get it.
Not judging

 

 

Lori Jakiela is the author of eight books, most recently All Skate: True Stories From Middle Life (Roadside Press, 2025). She lives in Trafford, Pennsylvania. Her author site is http://lorijakiela.net.