how many are the shelves in your heart,
the truths you keep folded away in your corners?
ours is not the home that finds itself
wrapped around a warm kitchen table, instead
we see each other in the water damage spots,
the places where the walls are worn thin
enough to push a thumb through
the house shudders each time
a door lurches free of its frame and sags on its hinges
a willful perforation of the desperate and the necessary
we hear each other only in the moans of sick floorboards
under the heaviness of the unspoken,
the beams have thickened and calloused,
the viscera, frayed
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