We are folding laundry together when my husband holds up a piece of cloth. “What’s this?” he says.

“Just a rag,” I say.

He puts on a little squeaky voice, pretending to be the rag. “I used to be something!” he protests.

“We all did,” I reply.

We fall silent.

Cheryl Caesar lived in Paris, Tuscany and Sligo for 25 years; she earned her doctorate in comparative literature at the Sorbonne and taught literature and phonetics. She now teaches writing at Michigan State University. Last year she published over a hundred poems in the U.S., Germany, India, Bangladesh, Yemen and Zimbabwe, and won third prize in the Singapore Poetry Contest for her poem on global warming. Her chapbook Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era is now available from Amazon and Goodreads. See more at caesarc.msu.domains.