I don’t like to talk about my
house so I don’t
but the garage
is gone and so is everything
that was in it.
the christmas decorations
from my childhood,
oil painting of my mother
(asbestos),
all our halloween decorations.

my
childhood bedroom is gone
and so is everything that was
in it except for one soccer
cleat my mom found when
my dad died.
one day the sink
will collapse. it’s leaning.
the walls are so soft
with water and mold
we can’t fix anything.
we
have snakes
in there.
giant water bugs and
crickets and
slugs and  I have no
yearbooks. I have a couple
notes from my friends
and a swath from a cologne sample
my high school lover
used to wear between
fucking his wife and me
accompanied by a note
he wrote me once:
there is wine in the fridge.
but I am thinking of
myself younger 

than that,
a shoebox of tokens

and the old lip gloss bottle,
a roller, vanilla scented
but pink
that I had saved because it
reminded me of an entire
freezing december
on my crush’s bench
where sometimes he let me
wear his sweatshirt
when I left my jacket home.
I am holding my hands to the ground,

feeling vines wind up
my calves.
repeating,
muttering.
what rolls off my tongue in
these heavy fits of consternation.
the way they describe me to the
ambulance: someone who
looked like she saw the horizon
close in on her and
collapsed.
the way they describe me
to the first responder
is that I looked to be seized
by terror like she saw the
horizon closing in and
just fell
to the ground. 

“Persephone”