Windex mice squeak through the windows,
biting newspaper as it scrapes across.
Soap from a new age fills the kitchen,
sheeps' fat long forgotten,
the sod-house of Laura Ingalls Wilder left behind
with its crumbling Lincoln logs,
the ceiling that drops dirt crumbs like a gritty pastry.
Our world is shiny,
so blinding that even the cough of newsprint makes it brighter.
A bottle sneezes across the counter, spurts those
bubbles of ammonia, gathers with the
rivers and tides that surge with ethanol,
it bursts the air with a neon smell and erases
everything that has come before.