Hard-boiled smoke & why so little light? The silo- 
shaped ash tray collecting a crown of wrists again. These 
shady maniacs. Because of course. Someone pulls open  
the back door to ask, Where’s your grandma? Hello, Darla,  
hello, Irish. Even the house flies—gorged on dish soap  
& apple cider vinegar—take time for granted. Whisked  
off course by indolent hands, they amble blithely away.  
Electric fans make language, long-throated. Brown recluse  
up the arch of a foot makes language. Traveler’s palm  
threshed by wind the night before a suicide. Language.  
Hello, lice baths, hello, French dip sandwich. The balding  
rug wears a wig of filth. Braid it. Goodbye, Daphne, good- 
bye, Shawna. Welcome in, says no one. This shoebox wards  
off nothing but the firmament. Necrotic heatwaves, black  
coffee annotating the air. Cheap mink imitation we call  
morning. Slot it behind a plastic display window. Still I   
am a granddaughter rising to perform old photographs,  
re-rehearsing light & glass, light & glass, glass & uncle,  
uncle & alley, father laminating my littlest hairs with gel.  
I look for myself in every doorjamb I pass through,  
the versions killed off by inattention. That I am this navy  
house & its historic nothings. That today I will fill the reliquary  
with each of them, like some kind of grieving spouse.