Shelf Life - Sarah Timmins

The first day of the year lurched in like a demolition crew—
not the kind that leaves rubble in neat piles, the kind that
buries your favorite mug in cement.

I skipped breakfast. Instead,
coffee sloshed  bitter in my
stomach.

The grapefruit on the counter mirrored me--
its rind fissured, caving inward, as if to say:
I didn’t ask to be here either.

I always thought I’d be the kind of person
who eats grapefruit. I wasn’t.

At the window, Chicago’s winter leaked in:
black coats staggered, like half-charged androids,
faltering through the morning’s static— glitter
and garbage, nip bottles rolling under cars,
cigarette butts coughing out last year’s embers.

Through the thin wall next door, a
young woman wailed into the dawn--
“I love you!” to a figure
ducking into a parked
car below.
A man dragging a plastic bag at the bus stop spat back:
“Shut the fuck up!”

Both felt valid.
Both felt earned.
And he meant it—he meant:
Don’t you dare use that word at this hour. Don’t lace this morning with sweetness while the city tucks its wounds  beneath borrowed light.

Across the street,
through the streaked pane of my window,
I noticed a pair of scuffed heels slumped at the corner bar’s entrance, angled toward a door crusted in vomit. They’d done their time.
From above, I looked closer,
traced the outline of my shelf life--
what had softened; what calcified
to endure, the grief I bartered for
bitterness, if I was happier now, or
just better at pretending.

I reached for the grapefruit, took a bite, and
let its sour settle on my tongue.
My lips puckered, bracing for something sharper.
I swallowed, stepped from the window, and let
its taste pin me beneath the new year’s
indifferent light.


Sarah Timmins is a Denver-based poet who writes with deliberate precision, unraveling the quiet tensions we carry but rarely name. A member of The Poets Den, she crafts work that sits in the spaces we avoid—where resilience cracks, surrender settles, and the truths we resist come into focus. Her poetry refuses resolution, thriving instead in the raw, unresolved edges of identity and connection. With over 12 years in marketing, Sarah has shaped strategies that cut through noise, blending analysis with creativity. She brings the same clarity and intent to her writing, asking readers to confront what lingers beneath the surface.