They Tore Our House Down With the Lights On
by Evelyn Blanchette
which, I had asked you to turn off,
but that seems neither here nor there now.
Though I did pack all of your breakables
into shoeboxes, wrapped in newspaper comic strips,
and you left the lights on. Sometimes I go back
to look through the window in your bedroom.
Standing on the curb, I outline a three by two foot
aperture, clipping some branches in half, and
scraping the horizon clean off the face of the Earth.
Somewhere, someone sees exactly what I have
cut out of this side of things, in a world where nothing
was ever boxed up, or shipped out. Maybe we don’t
even mind the light there, now that the place is all windows.
Sometimes I stand at the living room wall and stare
straight down the dark street, to the place where the wind shifts
the hedges, back and forth, over a small rectangular moon.