This is Plahm at his most vernacular—a poem that reads like a barstool monologue transcribed at 2 AM, complete with digressions, parenthetical asides, and the narrative discipline of a man who keeps almost getting to the point and then swerving into another story. The opening sets the frame: “I left the bar at 2 / After telling this / Tall Tale / Except it’s / Truth.” The distinction between tall tale and truth is the poem’s governing tension: everything that follows sounds like exaggeration but is presented as fact, and the reader is left deciding which register to trust—which is exactly how bar stories work.

The table leg is the poem’s protagonist, and Plahm treats it with the affection and biographical detail usually reserved for human characters. Its history is layered like an archaeological site: the dog chewed it into something resembling tornado-damaged oak branches; the great-granddaughter decorated it with a scarf and painted pink-toed shoes; the cat (named Cat-astrophe, a pun delivered in a parenthetical so casual it almost passes unnoticed) used it as a urinal; it collapsed at Thanksgiving, creating a near-catastrophe; and it served as an improvised weapon against a drunk drifter attempting a robbery. Each episode adds a scar and a story, transforming a piece of furniture into a character with a resume.

The robbery sequence is the poem’s narrative peak, told with the compressed energy of a police report filtered through a raconteur’s voice: “Stupid moronski was drunk / I grabbed that crooked / Chewed up / Pissed on (the cat part belongs here) / Table leg / And whacked him on his / Acorn noggin.” The parenthetical “(the cat part belongs here)” is a masterclass in comic timing—the speaker interrupts his own action-hero moment to properly attribute the piss to the cat, because narrative accuracy matters even in a bar fight. The arrival of “ice-cycle bikes” (motorcycles with police, rendered phonetically) and “zippy ties” (zip ties) keeps the language in the speaker’s vernacular, refusing to clean up the diction even when the law arrives.

The poem’s emotional turn arrives in the final stanzas, where the table leg—broken on the intruder’s skull, splinted with a tree branch and donated zip ties, returned to its socket—becomes something more than furniture. “He’s got real / Strength / Character” attributes human virtues to a piece of wood, and the connection to “Our Museum”—”will earn a place / In my personal museum / Of history”—stitches this poem directly into the catalog’s museum thread. The closing is the poem’s most tender and most surprising passage: “The table leg / Doesn’t want / Infamy. / Maybe just a little / Dignity. / To support the next / family dinner.” After all the comedy, the violence, the cat abuse, and the zip ties, the table leg’s ambition is the simplest possible thing—to hold up a table for a family to eat together. Dignity through function. Worth through service. A poem about a broken thing that keeps working.