How your street sways
Like a backward destiny
Built on earthquake bones
With its blossoms and green.

Your bedroom corners folded
Into my dreams,
Showing more places to hide.
Where I boxed myself to the age of five.

Oh, house- I cannot look sincerely.
Your new fence, your second floor.
I’m content from the thoroughfare
To sigh at the bend in the road
Where I know you must be.

Fresh in my mind is the tone of your dial.
7-5-8-0-8-9-5 on the phone.
Like a stamp on my arm in ink and blood- it’s me.

The gate to your yard illuminated
With red tulips and crabgrass and lilac trees.
I buried solemn wishes in your onion dirt.

I tasted the cricket moon from your overhang,
On your grey sills splattered with bee-holes.
Your hum observed my eyes at night.

I thought your furnace was the devil
With its shiver on, rumble off in the dark.
I cannot bear to see your corpse,
Your necro-shingles, your new folks.

Would you remember this girl
who noted beneath the wallpaper?
In prose and carnation crayon,
I scribbled the year and JENNY.

My witch-hut’s been dismantled
Since the last time I spied.
I hung silver stars from its ceiling,
From its cobwebbed steeple, now dead.

I saw the real children play
From my hazy upper window
Atop my curfew bed.
I thought I saw snow in July-
You gave me that.