Swift smudges like bodied dust
flurried from the pantry’s darkness
to hover and settle on ceiling,
lightbulb, and hair.
Until I climbed a chair and scrubbed
each inch with bleach, purging
half-empty pasta, matcha, cocoa,
Crisco, anything open at all.
When finally I found the larvae
(waxy wagging fingernails
like small worms soft-bedded in our flour)
I fled gagging
to the driveway. We’d had
roaches, mice, brown water
raining through the roof in storms, even
after the landlord ‘fixed’ it. We’d adopted
a dog barnacled with scabs—nits dried
to her blood—while my roommate
went quiet, wandered, was sometimes
(I suspected) a danger
to herself. Her mind
vanishing like a moon
gnawed
by earth’s shadow.
But no,
worms
cracked me
halved me
had me bent over, counting breaths, repeating
I can’t go in there and won’t.
A world more perishable
than I’d been told, and turning,
holy not with light but hunger—many
hungers tunneling our soft, soft hearts.
In the morning I would buy jars, disinfect, seal everything
in glass and metal. I would try to starve
only those wordless mouths, and keep
in full view what fed us. But first,
in the driveway, I would take shelter
for a few minutes, shaking,
make small griefs a refuge from greater.
To balk for a moment at trivial loss as if we hadn’t
all summer
been losing
so much more.
How many years later I learn
to look more kindly
on the girl who thought she would sustain that house
with grit and silence and held breath.
On the minds
who lived there, all in those months folding inwards
like spent birds.
On the moths,
waking to their brief life,
seeking air, beating
their little white lights of wings.
