Family Home

Family Home

I woke this morning on my left side,

Box fan whirring, plinking,

And with our bed positioned,

As it is, under the window,

For a moment 

in that liminal space

I thought I was in my parent’s bed,

Some awkwardly impossible half awake

Awareness that I, thirty-eight, 

was laying in bed with my parents

In our old house, the house I grew up in.

I let the illusion grow from that vague place.

I lay very still, felt my left shoulder ache,

not wanting to break 

the spell,

(surely I’d cast it-

a memory spell)

when I pretended I was really there.

The layered smell of dog fur and cat,

And that fine, oily dust kicked up by the 

Cars on the freeway. I could hear them.

The sound of air being forced away as hundreds

Of people passed behind our back

Yard with somewhere else to be.

Trucks would pass, they made a gravely rumble,

An old man clearing the congestion from his chest.

Was it the air breaks, or the knobby tires?

I never knew, didn’t wonder when I was young.

One doesn’t notice the song of the birds

who live in their own backyard.

If I opened my eyes (which I didn’t)

There would be mint green walls

And the edge of a filthy screen, that same greasy silt.

A crack stretched from the corner of the

Window to the corner of the 

Room, gaping a half inch wide,

Veins on the back of an old woman’s hand.

We’d never patch it.

Everyone knew the city was taking 

This house, better off a freeway on ramp

Then the place where I kept my

Babysitter’s Club books and my bag

Of foreign coins.

If I opened my eyes (which I didn’t)

There would be the soft clutter,

Everywhere. That might be the 

Worst part. Clothes, blankets,

Pictures frames, boxes piled two feet deep.

Stacks of bills, wrapped in lined paper,

rubber-banded and abandoned.

If I were to get out of that bed (which I didn’t)

I’d go to the shower, see if it is still there.

I can feel the thin, slimy grime on the tile

Under my feet, left from endless standing water.

The pebbled glass shower door

Hung cock-eyed in its frame.

We’d lift it on its hinges so the corner wouldn’t catch,

But once when I was seventeen, naked in a shower cap,

It shattered when I forced it.

My feet were buried, a deep pile of tiny glass pebbles.

The sound of the breaking door was too loud,

I shook from cold and shock, and I wrapped

Myself in a towel and stood very still

Until my dad came. Do I remember him looking angry?

Or afraid?

The house will be sold now.

As is.

Kitty litter still stopping up the third toilet.

Concrete still upheaved from the ravages of an ash tree.

I wonder if my Aunt June will stay.

She died at the brand new kitchen sink in 1963,

Young and sudden,

And still turned faucets on and off, flushed toilets,

For years, or so went the family lore.

(My dad and I saw it once, though.

Standing at that sink,

That faucet handle moved up and

All on its own the water flowed, I swear).

I wonder if she will recognize the home where

She left her tiny children in 1963,

Once the flippers, flipping my family home,

 are finished.

My left shoulder is aching,

And I’ve kept my eyes closed and 

My body very still,

Thinking about that movie

I used to watch with my mom

Where Christopher Reeve found 

A penny in his pocket and had

To leave Jane Seymour, beautiful and young, 

forever.

I don’t want to break this spell.

I felt safe in this house, or

I’ve never known

what safe feels like.