in this new apartment that i have swept clean
i sit and wait for your arrival

i have my agitprop tucked under a mattress
like a teenage boy with his magazines,
i have taken the posters off my walls, turned
books backwards so their edges stick out
the yellowing pages like gaps in your teeth, hollow spaces
filled with the symphonic horror of my philosophy/photography/poetry collections;
triumphant: i have orchestrated a composition you will never comprehend.

you will inspect the blank, pockmarked walls,
ask semi-casually after a boyfriend, but i’ve bought traps to keep the pests out.
for all this distance between us,  
i’m still terrified i’ll end up with the phantom imprint of you
stuck to my walls like tacky, greying tape, the corners of thin paper
clinging to my fixtures, fixations, finishes, fetishes,
haunting consecrated grounds.

in this new apartment,
i sit and wait for your realisation that the bathroom door
opens on the wrong hinge
it breaks - and lets out a guttural howl
you stir inside me somewhere

all fathers want to be their eldest daughters.