Mary Elizabeth Birnbaum
AT HOME AT NIGHT, ALONE
I know the pleat of skin between eyebrows,
its deepening around the shifts and dips
of speech; complexity ironed
into the simple by habit, the drift away
over years from hollowing bone.
Each small hard contraction of the heart,
I feel splinters; each breath gathers dust,
a scrape of broom, of chair legs,
a scuff of shoes on a much walked on,
much scrubbed, maple-wood kitchen floor.
The flash of a window, a latch’s turn
makes a house live. Once a tree, now stilted
and silent, branches stifled in plasterboard,
structure trembles, wanting to be sung to.