Home is in
The cramped spaces
Where couch and loveseat
Fill a room
Where the kitchen
Doesn’t fit
More than two people
And the dishes
Cleaned by hands
Of my mother
Smoking menthol cigarettes

Home is in
The cheap plaster
Walls so thin
You hear
A thousand tragedies pass through
At night when you are sleeping
Babies crying
Mothers crying
Everybody crying
No one happy makes a sound

Home is in
This endless wheel
Of poverty sickness
No one asked for
Or wanted
On welfare
Selling loose cigarettes
Forty ounce malt liquor
Six packs
Emptied
Friday’s hunger

Home is where
Old ladies rent
Single bedroom units
With no air conditioning
Alone with
Endless birdfeeders
And white bread
On the lawn
Out the window

Home is where
Hardwood floors are scarred
With rearrangement
Constant variation
Definitions shifting
Under orange parking lot
Floodlights
Obscuring night’s blessing

Home is where
I see into the lives
Of a thousand strangers
Never talking
Where children play
Identity games
In the park

Home is in
The Christmas lights
Strung on the windows
Carelessly by neighbors
Or in the wreath
My mother hangs
To signal autumn

Home is
Buttered bread and noodles
When there’s nothing else to eat
It’s a movie
You’ve seen a thousand times
And still laugh at

It’s the clothesline
My grandfather strung up
In the basement

It’s the gangs of children
That secretly run the streets

It’s in the identical faces
All spilling light
Out onto the pavement

Home is not a place
It is a collection of universes
All spilling into one another
Mixing in infinity
Blending forms

Home is the embarrassment I felt
When we turned onto my street
And the realization that
I’ve got it better than anyone I know

Home is where the world ends
And where we are all secretly trying
To get back to