The Little Red Brick Home

Remember that night, we spoke casually till your limbs began itching for the doorframe, only then did you ask, “Why are you standing on the table?” I couldn’t explain that I needed to. So I said, “I just want to.” But you understood, and threw a tantrum for me so we could laugh instead of cry. I collapsed on the ugly couch. 

We talked about hanging family portraits in the stairwell of people we should belong to, mostly grandpas from National Geographic who are slightly eccentric and sisters from Africa whose bold gaze continually startles me. We don’t have fathers or mothers.

Some days we laugh in two-part harmony.  An atomic high-five skipped down the passage of our eyes when I lead him through the door and passed you in the hallway.  Beneath my barely concealed joy and mildly discreet contentment you knew the interior of my head was pin-balling. 

I externalize my secrets by accident, like the day the dishwasher snowed on the kitchen floor after we’d packed up the entire house to rave music and cursed the bug kingdom from A to Z. I’m still up for inventing the PA system so we can interrupt each other abruptly and she won’t have to use her cell phone to call from downstairs to upstairs. 

We plan anti-party-parties with one-hand-count guest lists.  My mood hop-scotches like scanning the radio, but you don’t mind.  We co-exist in our compulsive movement, talk of foreign lands, of turquoise tiles, of sunflowers on the table till the map falls off the wall. You beg me to write that feminist poem, so we can put it on the fridge. You’d probably even find a sticker for it, like a mother.

Remember the night I locked myself out and came to your door:  and in the morning we felt inebriated by the bullet-like joy that had pierced us, we stayed in bed, basking in the luxury of sabbath sundays, whispering like sisters, finger-puppets and gangster yoga poses in borrowed sweat pants till the laughter tilter-worlded. We ate fig cake for breakfast.

Yellow leaves plastered the ground and we walked till our feet hurt, trying to walk something out of our soles. Sudan is red. I read Nietzsche aloud to you along side the Bible and we break our broken hearts into pieces of laughter and shouts to cough out of our body. I read your palm, your eyes, and write it down in poems and you say, "screw you, Meg Brauckmann, for stealing my soul." 

You scribbled “manual labor” as your dream job, and I knew you were mostly serious—because we need messy hands for our messy hearts, sediment on our fingers to ground us. We turn up the music, so we can say what we want. But the sound beneath the song is always fear and love, fear and love, and every once in awhile: home.