this is the city that my daddy built inside of me between my guts where my heart should be. what isn’t rusted or burnt out or tired is barbed-wire and wary.
this is the city that my daddy built with his anger. it’s set up high on a hill of scissors and blood oranges and blood oranges with scissors inside of them, red juice stains in sticky pools and dirt.
this is the city that my daddy built in our house. in our home. where the people are shadows, speaking in whispers tiptoeing behind closed doors so as not to rouse the beast.
this is the city that my daddy built here we pay tithes in blood oranges to humor his desires warding off uncalled for bloodshed like the time that I finally stood up for myself and he broke the kitchen table with his fists. it was an antique that traveled with my great-grandmother from Sweden, now just another broken thing in the landslide of scissors and blood oranges and dirt.
this is the city that my daddy built, scarring my skeleton, following me everywhere like a spilled bottle of India ink blacking out the finely drawn sun, like past transgressions follow the guilty, like the golden touch of Midas, turning everything into a mountain of scissors and blood oranges and dirt.
this is the city that my daddy built, making my concept of home a depiction of ruins; the vestiges of what could have been if we hadn’t lived too close to his minefield, before causing my mother to take my sisters and leave like a snowbird at the arrival of spring, at last realizing that her spine consisted of wings.
this is the city that my daddy built. this is the city that scarred and weary, shadows of skeletons of birds, we will move on, leaving behind brick by ***** brick until it’s nothing but a memory of a pile of blood oranges and scissors and dirt.