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I don’t remember when
I first woke here anymore.
Or perhaps it’s not that I don’t remember,
but rather that I simply don’t know—
when this started, where I am.
{You’re nine and in bed, shaking
from the stomach flu.
No. This is your college apartment, mid-February,
and your pipes have frozen.
Quiet, don’t speak so loudly. Don’t you remember
that you’re subletting a room in a third-story walk-up
and the downstairs neighbours are both night-shift nurses?
This is your family’s home. You are your mother’s child.}
Some things I do know—
I brush my teeth and wash my hands.
I scrub at dishes that I don’t recall dirtying,
answer the ringing phone to silence.
I sit in gem-green water and my eyelid twitches, gnaw
at my lips until they raw. I listen
to whispered urgings that are not my own;
cold iron shavings
{collected only from the rusted kitchen knife}
rosewood splinters
{buried in my fingertips}
palo-santo
{burned, thick, every 21 days}
and turn them ritual.
Somehow, I think the house is breathing.
The corridors inhale, hold onto their
sighs— the rooms get bigger, bloat.
They warp at the edges.
I used to see people
at the ends of those distant halls: a nurse
{with straw for eyes}
who smiled and shook
my pill-bottle, a baby’s rattle—
{have you taken your medicine yet, pup?}
a blind child who hummed The Itsy Bitsy Spider,
the cobweb-shrouded figure of something
that never moved until I blinked it away,
{but it has been so long.}
The walls seem to know me now.
Sometimes, a woman peels herself out of them
and stands over me in the night. She croons —a boneless song—
until I crawl to her, supplicant. Until I stand and tuck my head into her
shoulder, melting into a body that smells like my own.
I can taste iron in the air, rust
and summer salt. The floorboards mutter
as I pace them, heel-toe heel-toe.
There is a drip in all of the sinks;
and just before dawn,
their steady tip-tip-tip’s begin to chorus,
{you were human once,
you were human once.}
Something alive runs through the faucets.
I open my mouth and suckle;
let it feed me, wrap me up in a womb of rest.
In the half-moments between dreaming and waking,
I breathe my thanks:
{the house provides,
the house provides.}
Christel Thompson is a prose writer and poet, with a keen interest in dissecting themes like isolation, yearning, and what it means to be seen. Her work has appeared in giallo lit, pier:to cultural collective, and 433 magazine. Outside of her literary endeavors, she is a portrait photographer and avid Neon Genesis Evangelion fan. You can find her work/contact at christel-thompson.com
photo by Vladimir Konoplev and Piyapong Sayduang (via pexels)
Crow & Cross Keys 