This is my inappropriate hometown:
a house of muddied lights sitting back from the corner,
a screened in front porch without a screen.
I can taste the mosquitoes the air is so thick.
Here, every room is golden. Let me show you
the curves of the girls bleeding into the molding.

Here are contained fields of red cups like butterflies
each one poised on the edges of tipping end tables,
and you can see visions of them taking flight
in the yellowed clouds pooling about our feet,
or else they are the feet of our friends, lying
deliberately against the floor.

You ask me if the stars have always been the ceiling
and I do not know. I only know these tiles
were a part of the river you swam in as a child,
back before I knew you, before the moon,
and now they are caked with moss from our shoes,
stranded in this bathroom. I am here in this attic,
devouring the chimney that juts through its stomach.
Everything an attic should be and I hold it close.

You are telling me that the kitchen is painted
sea yellow, not mountain red, and that the windows
are imported not from France, but from a Dutchman
who lives down the street with his two braided daughters.
You are silly for noticing these details that creep so like a rope,
I tell you. And maybe this house has stairs
like your mother’s neck but why aren’t you listening:

02/14/2008

Author's Note: I have a lot to say:

Posted on 02/14/2008
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