I do not have a home—my mouth, a sunken grave
I keep climbing out of. They say my city is
below sea level & this must be why I run down the street
and choke on my own breath. Where my grandmother
tells me to stay away from boys. I can’t help it, my mouth
is quicker than my feet can catch up to. I think of my father,
how he always wanted a son to play catch with. Instead, I fall,
I skid my knee down the driveway and bleed into the gutter. I miss.
I baby but do not cry. At night, I wander the shores looking
for my tears in the sand. My footprints, just skid marks in a desert
playing beach, my edges the cliffside. What else would I give
for my softness? Smoothed out stone—riverbed—lay me down here
I can forget there is an ocean my father crossed to
build a home neither of us want to return to.
In the beginning, we triumphed over the dexterity of our hands
that knew what it meant to carve and be carved. I want to tear it all down:
pry off each brick, tear through mortar, peel back plaster, break
every window, nail the picket fence into a cross, and dig a hole.
I wish to sink this house back into the ground,
back into the earth we crawled out of.
