It was the year bank called

the cracks in the plaster,

the fissure between the bricks,

the silence behind the meadowlarks,

the useless rustling of leaves.

 

The year you said love requires a home

and pointed to the buckled ceiling,

the inadequacy of the way

we arranged letters into words,

words over feelings.

The year you stopped baking,

let our ribs jut forth like flimsy frames,

The year we noticed the ant hills had become vacant;

no more guilt

for carelessly arcing the mounds across the crumbling porch.

 

It was the year I wandered,

tried to navigate the crooked halls with my hands,

fingered the walls like a blind person.

Meanwhile you surveyed our fractured pastures,

a lone swallow fluttering against a steel gray sky.

Nothing to see but devastation.

 

This year I went back,

pulled into the ditch we once owned,

crawled down to the sediment-choked creek

and splayed my fingers on the surface,

breaking my reflection, shattering me

like the windows shattering in that old house.

Then I watched myself gather again

like the fields shifting in an unlikely earthquake—

the same but different.