More Like Realizing It Was Never There

Estelle Bajou

Not home, or exactly
family.
Not precisely death
or divorce. Sky
not quite black past
the haze of sconce
light by the door
to our
mother’s basement
apartment,
which
you consider yours.
Passerine song, big
brown spider, thyme,
zinnia, oak, mint,
blackberry.
Clay I clawed out,
flattened
to install the concrete
pavestones
under her green metal
table
with matching chairs.
This big house
with
your name on it,
that you
bought
but need her
to live in,
half pay for,
mind the children
sometimes, be
your downstairs witness
at just
the right times
from just
the right distance.
Small grey moth
on beige siding,
pine bark mulch,
mosquito,
blueberry, toad,
ajuga, crepe
myrtle, knockout
rose. This anger
you store up during
dinner, rotten
chair leg,
carcass of intimacy,
very
old sustenance
you couldn’t
stomach
in a mere of bile.
Rosemary, beetle,
fleeting
lizard, tomatoes
that grow but
never ripen
in this heat.
Bougainvillea,
creeping
jenny,
palm,
impatiens,
brambly vines
choking the maples
and privets,
nandina,
thrush, holly.
This baleful dance
of not saying
what you really think,
of me, my aberrant
praise, my coarse
delight, famishment,
sorrow, defense.
Young doe
with big ears
munching
wild strawberries
at the edge of the bosk.
Bluebird, fern,
wren, canebrake,
cricket threnody.
Door
in the wooden fence
swung open.
Hose in the grass.
Not really
my sister.
Truck
on the distant highway
I wish I was driving,
far away from here,
for good.

Estelle Bajou is a French-American polymath. Her poetry is featured or forthcoming in Cathexis Northwest Press, Heavy Feather Review, Broad River Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Middlesex: a Literary Journal, Abstract Elephant Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, and This Broken Shore. She’s also a critically praised, award-winning actor and composer. Raised in a furniture factory town in the North Carolina mountains, she now lives in New York City with a bunch of houseplants. Visit her at estellebajou.com.

© Variant Literature Inc 2021