Will Schutt

DOORMAT

The floor is showing through its threadbare coir
and haphazard clumps of finer threads
remind you of human hairs
collected at the barber’s or of a forest floor.

Like a Burri burlap, the feeling that survives
is in the feel of the thing: heavy, with poor
drainage. Looking, you novelize. 
You believe your true subject’s just below, hidden, 

but underneath is floorboards, and underneath that
dirt. A doormat
is one who lets the object of their affection
walk all over them. I was called that

once. Love held me under its foot.
It stomped and stomped. And I welcomed it.

WILL SCHUTT is the author of Westerly (2013), selected by Carl Phillips for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His translations from Italian include My Life, I Lapped It Up: Selected Poems of Edoardo Sanguineti (2018) and Brief Homage to Pluto and Other Poems by Fabio Pusterla (2023). He teaches at John Cabot University in Rome and co-directs Policromia, an annual international festival of poetry and translation in Siena, Italy.