Nicest Room in the House by Leah Mueller

My living area and kitchen

are the same room: large

enough to be two rooms,

but made into one,

for economic reasons.

Imagine a studio apartment

with two small bedrooms,

plus an orange bathroom

covered with garage sale art.

Most people take their

guests into the kitchen for a

slice of pie and some coffee,

but I like to usher them

directly into the bathroom.

Not everyone has a

three-foot-tall picture

of a bison over her dryer,

even in Bisbee. If you are

going to spend several

hours a week in the bathroom,

you might as well feel good

about it. And, when you’re done,

I hope you saved room for pie.

---

“I rather like this poem, since it’s whimsical. But nobody else seems to like it, so I grudgingly tossed it into the cyber-scrap pile. A person can’t really relate to it unless they have a weird house with an orange bathroom.”

Leah Mueller's work appears in Rattle, NonBinary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Citron Review, The Spectacle, New Flash Fiction Review, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, etc. She is a 2022 nominee for both Pushcart and Best of the Net. Leah's flash piece, "Land of Eternal Thirst" appears in the 2022 edition of Best Small Fictions. Her two newest books are "The Failure of Photography" (Garden Party Press, 2023) and "Widow's Fire" (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Website: http://www.leahmueller.org.