This Empty Home
They are building a house up the street from mine. I watch them working on it every day when I walk by. It’s beautiful, all the wooden planks crossing each other like a geometric foreshadowing: this house is being built for someone, being prepared for a future, like a body. I wonder if I’ll miss this place, where the houses are all different. I compile them together, build houses in my mind. They stack up on each other and are inseparable from you, or me. I build walls and then I knock them down. I build windows and draw the blinds but leave the panes uplifted to let in the breeze. I hang pictures, construct porches, and soon there are vacation homes, too. There is a house being built up the street from me; this house is being built for someone, prepared like a body, and I am being built, too. Identity is unstable/you are the illusion of stability. As I walked by the house this morning, I noticed the progress: new windows and slate-blue paint and I thought, “Maybe by the time that house is built, I’ll be built too.”
The Landscape We Left on Each Other is out of print from The Blasted Tree Store.
Featured by The Blasted Tree: October 8, 2018
Lauren Elle DeGaine
Contributing Author
The Landscape We Left on Each Other by Lauren Elle DeGaine is a Blasted Tree collection of poetry.
ISBN [Digital]: 978-1-987906-37-0
Cover Design by Kyle Flemmer