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1

There is a house where the walls are on fire.

This, maybe, is the beginning.

There is a photograph of a sinking ship in my father’s office

that is hung up on yellow walls, above loose paperclips

and an old video camcorder.

a dark haired man speaks, the audience watches,

unaware of elemental leftovers

and the story as it unfolds.

So people ask you what home means to you. There are a million possible answers.

There is the boy sitting on the wall

& flowers on a checkered tablecloth

and a faucet, dripping, without the weight of a world in pieces.

There is the answer, perhaps, of the hurricane in a new york city neighborhood

where home is a pitch black room, and eating dinner in sleeping bags

across from candlelit forms of the next door neighbors.

There is the answer with the red and blue lights, and the uniforms, and a ninth floor hallway

and how the phone rang when my grandma called

But that is the answer that can be told in a number of ways.

None of them would be the right one.

There is the answer of soccer games and saturday mornings

Where the man and the woman danced on the living room carpet, and birds would fly across the room

before settling, proudly, on our windowsills.

In this answer, winter means snowballs in the street

and in this answer summer means fruit cut into slices, & fireflies caught inside soda bottles

blinking on, & off, until an inevitable release.

This answer has become hard to remember, now.

There are the mathematical terms

of chaos systems, and strange attractors

and how points, that are near eachother at one time,

will be arbitrarily far apart at later times.

In this answer, home becomes nonlinear dynamics and deterministic equations,

the untouched plates in a dinner table argument

And the reassurance, maybe, of knowing the rules

Like how points will never leave the phase space

& motions never repeat

And the system will never close in on itself.

There is the answer of simultaneous extreme opposites, and nights spent in

the thirteenth floor stairwell, and of the corresponding gravel on rooftops

where a water tower drips,

paying homage to the weeds it has created below it.

where home is the girl with yellow hair, who is dancing, which has happened

in a number of places and times

And is something, now, of a universal constant,

among empty bottles and the flickering billboards.

There is the answer of the time you stood at the table screaming at your father not to die and then he died

anyways.

2

Here is a story: once a butterfly flapped its wings.

there were two birds that lived in a staircase, and a coin that was flipping in the air

and intangible aftermaths of a bedroom with blue walls.

This is the answer that pertains

to my sister’s drawing of a girl under a peach tree

and photos taken on film, specifically the one

where i’m standing at the stove

making a quesadilla for the fifteen year old on shrooms.

There are fourth dimensional spaces & the people who live in them, quantified by

their progression over time

and the dust on top of photo frames

Home is my mother, in a white dress,

immortalized by the crystallized fragments of oxygen in lungs

or maybe by how her body curled up on the floor,

or how it became an accidental mirror of the wedding photos above her.

this is the answer of sitting on the stoop on a summer night

and how the ice cream cones have melted

so two teenagers sit, cross legged, in a children's playground.

So home, sometimes, is orange towels on wooden floorboards

or how it’s been four years since I could keep them in the house.

And this is the answer where the neighbor with the dark hair speaks to us of pennies

and lightning bolts and butterflies

her unshifting beliefs, in perceived connections,

settled into the empty space between stars.

And sometimes home is every song that ever played on the radio

from when i sat in the passenger seat of a gray van,

which was every thursday evening

and how the grass stains would wash out of socks because

the stains always wash out.

this is the answer of a memory, and a red shirt in the back of my closet,

and how it is still untouched.

in this answer, a boy asks why I don’t move houses

and I can’t explain that home is a sinking ship

and leaving would be like washing the blood out from underneath my fingernails

Or how I used to think that the thud, of dirt hitting wood, was the worst sound

But it’s actually the silence of the shovel being put away.

Because this is the answer of walking the same circles in the same walls,

of becoming ghosts in an ability

to haunt our own floorboards.

This is an answer of doing things the same way over and over again

in this system, with many variables, and its own kind of order.

Where home is the people who are alive

and the people who aren’t.

There is the answer of how when I was ten I carved my name into my bedroom wall.

Nine years later, I have become

the black ink that lingers on brick buildings or wooden picnic tables

Because I have always needed pieces left behind, and the subsequent marks,

and creating proof, of existence, in the first place.

This is the answer about being human.

3

Here is a story: once a tree fell in a forest and everybody heard.

a teenager is sitting on the wall and the girl with the tattoos on her hands is braiding my hair in the kitchen

Which is small with one window and a red door

and cereal boxes on top of the fridge.

There are two mirrors in the living room, and both are cracked at the bottom

a reminder, perhaps, of the tigers fighting on linoleum.

i have become a collection of people &places & things

fragments of stories and memories

A memorial to all who have become coincidences, a shift in a projected trajectory.

a tv documentary plays in the background and we are all in the room with the golden walls.

and sometimes there is not enough oxygen in my lungs

for everything around me,

for the boys in fast cars and the girls in the ocean crashdowns

And sometimes there are not enough seconds in the universe

for me to breathe it in

In this answer, home is things like how

The girl with words cut into her skin is making ramen on a stovetop burner,

and the boy from next door is curled up, on the couch with the flowers on it, in the living room

a compass needle spins without direction

between north and south, east and west,

and a girl with flowers in her hair

who has become a common thread among strings attached.

She has a fleck of dark brown at the bottom of her left eye but

not her right one, you know.

The sinking ship remains untouched.

instead, sometimes

home is long legs under streetlights, smoke against stars,

visceral reactions to atmospheric changes.

An answer of soccer games and saturday mornings, again,

where summer means bare feet in the rain, and honeystained fingertips,

and cutting apples into slices

to eat in a parking lot.

There is a house where the walls are on fire.

This, maybe, is the epilogue.

This is the story of my mother dancing again in the living room,

where the people are different, and always will be

where home is love and grief and every rooftop sunset

and the miraculous asymmetry of a butterfly under a bridge, spray painted in orange.

This is the answer that pertains to gold lined fractures in broken cabinets

and building new worlds from shattered remains

And the way the stars look, in starry eyes, from behind my new apartment

where my roommate is dancing in the dandelions.

So people ask you what home means to you. There are a million possible answers.

This is the answer about how they lived

And they laughed

And they saw that it was good.