Issue #54


Authors

Ethyl

ETHYL

Tegan Beard

moving houses (v.):

finding new sources of light.

i illuminate the room

with darkness and see where

the candy corn glow

comes under the door.

moving houses (v.):

blocking out the labels from the last move,

using new colors, new handwriting, to create a system

that doesn’t work, not the way you think it will.

my grandmother’s stemware winds up in the

broom closet, my brother’s bed on the neighbor’s balcony.

moving houses (v.):

always my mother and i:

she sorts everything around me,

sculpting it into a mold of our lives.

i plaster my childhood across the walls again

with fred meyer duct tape and illicit push pins.

moving houses (feelings):

everything, everything,

an air mattress as a life preserver,

out to sea for six months with only

packing peanuts to gnaw on.

what stays. what goes. who stays. who

goes.

–– it is always her and i. we are always going

moving houses (looks like):

no threshold is a liminal space.

we are irreverent,

carrying sacks of rotting fruit on the city bus,

a stray strawberry baking beneath the seat of a stranger.

dislocating heat from vents with

every damn window wide open.

(we know that there are some boxes you just can’t unpack.)

moving houses (looks like):

even when we throw all the switches down,

there is a glow from the microwave, the

battery powered candles, the sparks loosed

from our own defiance –– not like joan of arc,

no; a softer kind of homeostasis.

the ability to find our footing,

to step on each other’s toes when there is

no other solid ground.

(we both know she has no regrets.

we both know she needed me

to be in this world with her,

to find new sources of light in every house

we enter.)

Notes on Transportation

A Dossier, or a case study, or that night I didn’t go home