The Spaces Between
I show my house the pictures of you
ask it if it remembers when you lived closer
when you were a frequent guest. I feel the ache and the strain
of a house trying to uproot itself, as if
it were some great, lazy dog trying to find the will to move
twitching its tail in a futile attempt
to attract attention to itself.
I, too, wish I could find some way to reach you
that doesn’t require the enormous effort it takes to get to the airport
or make plans that involve weeks and weeks of my life in advance.
These are fragile excuses, ones
I don’t dare speak aloud. Instead, I tell the house
you’ll be back someday
to sit on my couch and fill these empty rooms
with your stories and your laughter
and it will be so wonderful that it will be as if
you’d never left.
Contributor(s)
Holly Day
Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest books are The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), Book of Beasts (Weasel Press), and Music Composition for Dummies (Wiley).
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