Is Anyone Listening?
The house gets smaller at night.
He exists only in surfaces – the oven door, the smokescreen of a curtained window – and only next-door’s cat remembers him.
She cooked fish on Fridays, the kitchen full of the claggy stink, and he never liked fish anyway;
the cat remembers a bowl after dark, first pickings before the rats came. But
they always came after, and she screamed at him
that it was his fault. If he had only kept the back door shut –
In summer the window in the garage lets too much light in
rusts the bike he swore never to ride when his father left it on the curb that spring.
He only broke his word once –
up the canal path, where he knew she wouldn’t follow him
because she was scared of muggers. His breath was hot and caged in his chest, sharper by the minute, and he pretended he wasn’t crying until he got home. A bike isn’t a way to tell me he loves me, he said, and she stroked his face and said, Wow, you’re really sweaty. And they both knew it wasn’t sweat like
she knew it wasn’t oil on the floor that morning. Thick and cooling into patterns
on the tile, and he was in the sink and the mirror watching her call the police. The street
gets brighter at night, and he thinks about taking a walk between lit windows
but he doesn’t want to startle the children.
Daisy Harris
Daisy Harris Poetry 