What We Have

Now we have four walls, creamy white, yellow curtains and an overgrown front yard, spicy with nasturtiums. Home is a marble, rolling across our dark wooden floors, home is our ragtag free-cycle furniture, the yellow striped chair hanging threads, often sandy. We have put up posters, dangling beer-can cut outs, and painted skateboards, shadow boxes with candles and our tiny handful of DVDs; little things that feel familiar.

At sunset our bedroom glows green, slats of light across our matching black and white desks, pockmarked and covered in stacks of poems and long proofs. Our dog, the color of toasted marshmallows, sprawls across our striped bed, and blinks with lazy yellow eyes. Bits of fur may gather like tumbleweed in the corners, but we have animal print, books, big mugs, and a good coffee grinder.

We have a fraying home made tablecloth and silly cups with stories, your grandmother’s clay jar full of sugar, and outside our lettuce grows big and bitter. We have disorganized cilantro and kale, snap peas and bok choy. We have wriggling pink worms in a shady box, covered in newspaper. We have a blue shed.

We have a globe and a broken typewriter. We have secret boxes beneath the bed. We have a sewing machine and a pile of fabric and yarn, and a dresser with stupid knobs. We have Christmas lights around the doorway, and half a bottle of laundry detergent; we have our whole lives ahead of us.