Melrose street had a quaint little house that sat perched on the corner.
The inside was bare and small and plain,
the dust in the air hung still, motes visible in shifting sunlight.
I would bang open the back door with a clatter and run
past the swing-set to the gate dividing my yard from the next.
The girl there had hair the same golden silk as her dog’s.
And I’d scrape my knees on that fence more times than I could count.
There I would play, I would climb her trees and then
drain the sweetness from all the honeysuckles in her yard,
the summer air enveloping me in its heavy embrace.
Heritage was a new housing division,
many houses under construction stood empty, just skeletons.
I’d walk through the layout, a throat coated in dust
and sit on the roof as colors faded from the sky.
It was in those streets that I broke my wrist and
my mom did not believe my pain.
My parents fought hard and often
about big things and about little things
and this skeleton house was no longer any home of mine.
Inside, the walls reverberated with every cry and
the holes punctured the once smooth interior,
and no matter how much **** wall putty was slathered on
you could see the jagged shape of imperfections,
the tearstained cheeks that never dried.
A constant reminder.
“Foreclosure” was a term I was unfamiliar with,
I just knew that the paper taped to our front door
meant we had to leave.
So we grabbed our items and began the trek from one
cramped space to the next, a multitude of changing environments,
never being able to stay in one place for more than a year.
And my parents no longer loved each other and I didn’t know why,
A rumpled love note with a lie, “I love you for always and forever”
the only evidence that hate wasn’t always in their lives.
I began to miss the sunny days of my childhood.
Of scraped knees and honeysuckles when everything,
Including the dust motes, were in place and comprehensible.