It was a malevolent being, that small house in Riverdale
my mother bought just before I was five.
Of side-stroked brown brick,
it howled hungry for humans. The front door exposed
the escutcheon’s blotch
as it sat atop a low-ceilinged basement
like a mousetrap, baited and ready;
but nightly I listened to a train’s distant whistle.
Two bedrooms, small kitchen, living and dining room
squeezed hard below attic,
my room, where freight train’s whistle
pulled me from empty night
as it pierced the void in black space.
Blue-tiled bathroom was spiteful as mother applied
harsh scented chemical
to perm graying hair. Small house sneered
at Mother’s perfunctory workday kiss good-bye
placed upon on my cheek
while Grandmother dutifully cooked, cleaned and laundered white sheets
in the bowels of that seething house¾
it smirked as Grandmother’s fingers,
translucent skin over flesh like segments of orange,
began to twist and stiffen over piano’s ivory keys.
Thieving house! Stole her music of silent film and holiday,
but generously gave cancer in trade.
When her grandmother voice weakened, her house voice grew¾
“Schäm dich!” she would say to me,
the side-stroked girl, and press upon my tongue
pungent soda-mint tablets, meant to soothe and settle
whenever I’d remember the house
made her put my dog to sleep,
“Because,” she said, “he’s a nuisance.”
And the train whistle blew all night long.
Wicked house in which we lived, ate at my back,
bone of my spine, at the soles of my feet¾
it made my mother’s brother a giant, a tossed hot stone, a wolf within walls.
But, I grew tall, my arms stretched out windows and doors;
still, the house squeezed back¾
took them, one by one, swallowing them whole.
Grandmother didn’t know the house made her cruel;
would take her and her crucifix between its teeth.
Mother knew its intentions; it was her house.
They determined its big small house hunger
with their words and silences. Grandmother and Mother,
so big you both seemed in that small house.
Through single-pane glass from east-facing window
I saw footsteps I’d follow south,
always south, leaving,
no more listening
to the groaning belly of that house.
Wicked rooms and hallways with secrets
surrounded by railroad tracks leading backward
to Chicago; forward to fields
of everything beyond what had been.
So I told that house I was stronger,
its quiet-killing couldn’t bind this bastard girl
to its mortar and sewage. I declared its sin forgivable,
let it starve, not feeding its hunger.
Not a glance back did I make, but heard the house roar
its own death pang; its bowels empty, for lack of me.
So then, I followed the train whistle south
as I ravenously became, “Der wanderer ins nichts.”
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