#2 Our First House

Our house on Xerxes was small,

many windows and a smaller yard.

A forest grew there, trees

my brother and I would climb until

we noticed a sky, until the the ground dropped from us,

a ragged burden dispelled before a multitude of wings uncurling

like ferns above our waists as we ventured 

to the basement couch and a patient television.

The television, muted now, glows blue and gentle

and I feel it caress my arm. I open a door

and peer into the night. This is not my house,

but the house of a foreigner. I question the empty street

running past the house. To where does my family walk?

Holding hands? We appear younger and I see how much

my mother and father love each other. I see their eyes

and how they open on each other as if in waking.

When I was sixteen, I called myself

nobody. I liked the sound it made

as if I said it underwater in a storm. Nobody

gazed into the wide open blue, 

those days. Nobody cared for their own houses

anymore. Now I want to go back

to that house on Xerxes. I wish I could

unravel it in my fingers and spread it thin as a leaf. 

#1 A Hero Returns Home

This is the first in a series of poems written for my senior seminar class. There will eventually be seven of them. 

The second time we moved, I wasn't home. 

I was in Illinois, trying to disconnect myself

from a life I already understood,

putting on my nightly costumes and walking 

the streets alone as if I had purpose.

I did this so long, I woke up 

one morning and forgot where I was, which life

I didn't love and who my parents were. 

They were waking up in Minnesota, 

my father to dry toast, my mother to sunlight.

They called me home and I found no difference,

the furniture, the same, was all there, but

seemed a little smaller. A woman

with quiet hands, my mother, 

she arranged that furniture, perfectly.

Outside, the sun is in the trees. My father

working in the yard, opens up the earth 

with his hands. He was there before

dawn. He touches dirt as I turn away,

trying to regain a few lost hours sleep.