Homecoming
Genevieve DeGuzman My husband raps the door with knuckles bruised to warn the dormouse that we’re back. She’s made a nest of little pink ones translucent as skinned grapes, tiny as the secrets I keep. If you listen hard enough, there’s a lowing drumming in their chests that spins the morning and marches us through our day. The knocking startles her the way his memories now do. A childhood of boxcars and chimneys noisy with sparrows. Scuffed helmets and beaks scratching metal and brick seeking the sharp eye of the sun. We breathe in the fever spice of an early fall. Long-toothed grass turning to hay, easterly winds sussing the tired world, tree tops turned to leaf crackle at our feet. The world floats on this tremolo: glass lakes, wet-nosed deer, firepits. Whether by wind or bullet or ghost story they shift form. And he changes, too, when he recalls the widows huddled near hearth and loom, the women who fasted their desires in thread and ladles. He asks if they were happy making food and cloth. I nod, turning lie into enchantment. Of course, nothing makes up for the warp and weft of hearts undone. In slumber, his body unravels, remembers the longing of the unbuttoned boy before the urea-grip of spent shells and gunpowder. I’ve saved him, I think, but it’s a noisy country now, a restless country. Storm’s near. The thunder and lightning fall on the same beat. Still I listen for him for the beating of animal hearts and summers gone to seed. Land of black loam conundrum of birthing and weaning and carnage, yes—but also of home. |
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About the Author: Genevieve DeGuzman’s work appears or is forthcoming in Cider Press Review, An Online Artifact, FIVE:2:ONE, FOLIO, Reed Magazine, Strange Horizons, Switchback, and elsewhere. She has been a finalist for the Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize and a literary arts resident at Can Serrat. She lives in Portland, Oregon.