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.)