Botched Window

Fringe Arts Kat Mulligan — Published November 14, 2023 0 minutes

We have made an honest attempt

to keep the house warm.

The oven’s spit dribbles onto our shoulders,

a shroud of paranoia that has claimed

decent poets in prior times,

and the cat dampens himself in the spillage,

in the type of bliss that walks in as suffering

slides his business card into the mailbox.

We have made an honest attempt

to keep the house warm—

that is to say,

we have unstitched all ninety-eight degrees of our body

and turned them out like a sail.

Plain as pure form,

I hover over the drain of the bathtub,

undaunted by what once threatened to be

a stain on good skin,

collecting rare pearls of heat in my palm.

I know by ridges, by my own cold geography,

that this is a pale salvation.

And underneath a stack of fleece,

the botched window funnels in at the very point

where my birthmark tacked itself on.

We have made an honest attempt

to keep the house warm.

A water bottle languishes on the hardwood,

colder than any intention of electricity,

before a thermometer butts its head into its torment—

done quietly,

smothered by the aria of wind rubbing shoulders

with our alleyway.

Out on the town,

we remember these five rooms evacuated,

these five rooms shaking themselves off

in desertion.