Found Listing: 219A North End Road, Tinmouth Vermont 

A rust pocked stove, bracketed by a barren  

hamper, overturned & Bob the Builder ball  

with half its breath stomped out. 

Wall sconce bent to wall, the memory  

of our mother’s body  

crumpled to the floor, it’s pine underbelly  

carved in kid script:  

We are here, we are here, we were— 

Here, look closely, notice  

the impressions in the master bedroom carpet,  

how they sigh, like we did in the winter,  

a copse of cots around the crack & spit  

of the fireplace.    Conservation       as in  

Preservation.  

I remembered it differently, less exposed pipe,  

all ache—The sun spilling through the panes  

will wake the ghosts—I’m 13 again, pressing  

my body into the root cellar wall, mildew & dirt  

crowding my nostrils—I know what it means  

if he finds me, his rage filling our house like a lung. 

I wish I’d never returned, had left the house  

a scourge of memory its yard littered  

with the skeletons of solar panels  

& a snapped in half wind turbine.  

In the soil beneath the overgrown garden,  

a curse, a parasitic violence.