Yard Sale

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter Y:

yard sale—

a row of empty jars

tinges slightly red

This poem began life on 8 March 2012 in Redmond, Washington. Unlike most of the poems I write about in these index card essays, I have no memory of whatever might have prompted this poem. Maybe it was an actual yard sale, but March isn’t the best time of year for yard sales in the Seattle area. We all have memories of yard sales, of course. Did I remember red-tinged mason jars, too, or was I imagining that? The red tinge could suggest long and repeated use of those jars for a particular kind of fruit preserve, perhaps especially if the preserves had stayed in the jars for a very long time. And now, at a yard sale, these jars are finding a new home (one hopes). And like everything else at a yard sale, perhaps they symbolize a need for change, or they indicate an end in usefulness to the person who is selling them. And yet they still have value and are not being thrown out.

I first tried submitting this poem to Modern Haiku (most often the first place I try to send my haiku, or at least most of my best ones, other than to contests). That same year, 2013, I also tried Notes from the Gean and then South by Southeast, both without luck. Next I tried the 2014 Haiku Society of America members’ anthology, and the poem appeared in Take-out Window in 2014. Yard sales are always melancholy affairs for me, whether selling or buying. Perhaps you’ll find a treasure, or something at a great price that you badly need. But aside from that, yard sales seem to amount to a trading of junk, or a step to take before donating to charity or visiting the landfill. Yard sales are so often rites of passage—passages of loss. Here’s another yard sale poem of mine, written 8 September 1991, in Foster City, California, published in Sand Hill Review in the spring of 2003:

yard sale Sunday—

neighbours buying

each other’s junk

—31 May 2025 (previously unpublished)