how to build a home

10: just so

I took the subway: battered musicians,

sometimes you'd let me tip them, tooth fairy.

Train pulling out like your choleric sigh,

blowing, like the view from a mountain top

or the view from your eyelash: I climb it,

sit there, settle in the fold of your eye.

Then slip, jerked and heaved off my perch, outside,

before you, where I can still see remnants

of myself in the crease of your eye—Or,

rather, the remnants of you in my crease,

in my beady bird eye. And it does not comfort me.

But it does. Makes me a happy little

daughter, in our happy little house,

in our loud little house,

in our silent little house,

in the littlest of houses,

so little I feel the walls closing in,

and then I am no longer happy,

and comfort leaves my limbs,

and I feel it like the cold after too long a time

swaddled in a warm blanket.

And I hate this cold,

I'm bitter in this cold, this bitter cold,

I hate you with a cold fury.

Ergo I scratch my eye, and paint it black,

and if I smear the blood and the shadow

just so, I can—But I cannot. Of course.

When the sun abandons the sky, the nest,

when it leaves me to the mercy of my

obsessive little cold creeping fingers,

they scrub my face raw, and I shine a light

so I may look in the glass, skin dripping,

lashes clumped, cheeks crimson, and my eyes wide;

I look. Affirm the reflection with care,

verify that I have not by some means

metamorphosed during the blind of day,

that I am still myself, and that even

if I have little love for it, scant praise,

it is still me. But it is also you. Always you.

I still don't know how to pray,

but you took me to the subway

as a child, and going down

there, trading the birds' chitter

for your hum and roar,

is sort of like a prayer.

I think I am still in the subway,

I think I am stuck here now,

your echoing words and

charred cigarette butts form my nest,

I think I will never shrug them off.

Still waiting for that tooth fairy,

or maybe I am just waiting for you.

You stole my face, how I wish

I loved you, so that this may

be a blessing. But it is not.

Merlot, Rhiannon