My house is learning to listen. It has decided that it will never die.
Now, to talk to myself, I stand outside on the sidewalk whispering
and staring back over my shoulder at its windows. Around my house float many fields
of rings made of dirt, rocks, bottles, small bones, old couches.
There was a time my house scored high on NASA aptitude tests
and wanted to be a planet. On the surface of my planet, rains fall
and the weather is often mild and light doesn’t go far. I wake up
and sometimes the air is thinner than the night before as if my house
had risen several hundred feet in the night. All of this is just my imagination.
The door mat is where I left it, rain is still falling, and I can’t see
We can’t see the sky. We close our eyes. We’ve passed the longest day. It’s the end of June and it happens in fire and a circle. We have to remember how it happens. What happens to the things we don’t see? Years after the condolences, in so much time and air, words and images and moments and boxes that remain closed forever. There are lives embedded in the earth. We forgot our importance. We all look the same. The sky is open and the houses are all on fire.
David Wojciechowski is the author of Dreams I Never Told You & Letters I Never Sent (Gold Wake Press). His poems have appeared in Bateau, Jellyfish Magazine, The Laurel Review, Meridian, Figure 1, and other journals. David can be found online at davidwojo.com and on Twitter @MrWojoRising.