the house has a mind of its own, which is
to say the house is a mind,
which is to say i float lovesick through the halls
and you don't see me. you don't see me at all,

which is to say: the only difference between
haunting and haunted is where you're standing.
i'm only a ghost at the right angle.

the house has a ghost of its own, which is to say,
the house is a ghost. floorboards heartrupture.
you and i watch, at separate angles, as it throws itself
into oblivion — the slow decline of placehood.

to say anything at all creates an echo,
builds a ghost from scrap syllables.
this staircase is good for specters, you say:
it is so easy to be trapped in its spiraling.
a difference in perspective, from the top of the stairs to the bottom of a well

04/14/2020, prompt: pink, like your brain

7:05. drummer woman across the roof shouts
see you tomorrow & it bounces off our fire escape metal.
outside-sounds have learned to be a comfort, but the
city is teaching itself silence, an old skill relearned,
broken in regimented 5-minute stanzas and then returned.
you can, in fact, teach an old place new tricks.

9:05. fifteen golden windowlights on the south
half of the block divided by the infinite windows,
the people behind glasspanes.
yesterday i saw two girls ride past on the same
scooter, one with arms splayed wide: look,
she shouted, i'm in titanic. i'm rose. look.
i did look, and my laughter was five stories removed
but in tune with hers.

11:05. find a balcony, call it home.
call it breathable and undangeroused. we aren't
safe but the bikes ride past anyways, whirring spokes
in the night air. it's impossible not to write about disease.
every word coughs itself hoarse.

04/13/2020, prompt: the city
morning glory, morning glory, point me back to you

with your flower-language encyclopedia,
twice as old as you but no less
weathered, we pulled to the side of the highway
— middle of nowhere, not a headlight for miles,
picked wildflowers. beautyberry, doll's eyes.

we misplaced the sky for a moment, or we were
over it, on top of it, knee-high swampgrass just water,
after all, the same way clouds are. forgot to
hold our breath against the world. in a wasteland
where everything is holy, what is death? what's next?

04/11/2020, prompt: heaven/hell
pink

dance recital blush in a barbie-box
smell of backstage hallways, hundred-and-one
cookie-cutter girls who're all better at it than i
am and their moms who're all, at passing glance,
better, too, than the one who carts me to rehearsal
because quitting isn't in your blood, just in the
unpink staining my old jazz shoes

could never make the name of the tree in front
stick in my mind, but its petals were the color of
movie star lipgloss i pretended not to stare at,
and tracking them into the house was a crime.
punishment: existence, there. punishment:
saw on the treebranches, neighbors screaming-pissed that
something beautiful could fall on their pristine yard,
as if a patch of cut grass could mean more.

hatred is simple. the hot-magenta of it all, unlikeness,
unliked — it's not that i changed, just that a
softness sprouted in y cheeks until i couldn't cut it away.
women, after all, are beautiful. it's no longer
rotten gflowers on filth-ridden carpet or stale makeup.
there's a legacy, here: i am like you, protector, rose-
petaled, history.

04/09/2020, prompt: focus on the color
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