Small House

The half-dead raccoon dulls its nails

against the other side of my ceiling

brown leaves and the unnamed moon

tossed around the street

sort between garbage and carcass

tofu and rotten lemons claimed from the grocer

everyone’s greying hair in my bathroom:

everything animated in the magic that haunts

my life

is derived from the portal

my brother

and I made as kids from fallen limbs

sedimentary mud and birch skins

sins and cemetery dreams

that compelled us to jump from the roof

into the snow and run around

in the rain in our clothes

that gave us warts and rashes

washed up animal bones.

Now from the small house thatI keep

warm and clean

I fear that in the slurry of November-ish

the wind may have its way

and try its hand to push all the splinters

of our portal back together

and in

the rabid cavern of raccoon scratches

gussets for my memories

the mouldy lemons

in fluorescent fridge light

photos of past lives pinned on its gut

from this makeshift stick portal

would my brother run forth

alive

and not recognise who I’ve become.

II

Glacial intra

venous

drip of the furnace

filter to the floor drain

whispers to me of water

at dawn.

The house begins to decay

to creak

whenever I leave

as if the heart the liver the spleen

had managed to escape the body

and stiffness set it,

whenI return it breathes.

WhenI peer through my small house

at night

the darkness brings me

to his second floor room

at my parents’

and the pillows still dented by his head

the vents twitch

with the breaths of the house

brushes dust along its lips

and the willows sigh outside

the screen door blinks

andI fear

that if he’s not with me

I’m wading closer to him, with the

tac tac

naked steps of the dead

down the hall to my room

soft into my bed.

Evan D’Alleva is a poet whose work has appeared in local and national publications, in the form of lyrical vignettes of memory and place. These poems are inked out of the milieu of lamentation. They are busy at work on a poetic tradition that is at once youthful in its activism and ancient in its reservation.