Editor's Prize Winner | July 19, 2023

House Hunting 

I’ve taken to driving past places where I used to live. 

Peering at the landscape, the façade 

of this one or that one  

as if I’m at a high school reunion, 

smiling in conversation until the once-friend’s face softens 

into the familiar. 

I wonder if the lilac trees still syrup the air every spring  

and if big maple leaves pile like pancakes  

in the fall 

if the agapanthus’s blue heads forever nod in the pool’s reflection  

if the swing still hangs from the avocado tree 

if the punched wall was ever patched  

if the near-famous neighbor still lives next door 

or did I read he’d died? 

if the roots have choked the sewer line  

if the ghost has returned, the wasps, carpenter ants, rats, 

racoons 

if children sleep where mine once did, hair sleek  

with sweat, cheeks pinked 

if behind the now red door someone 

also found love, late and grizzled?  

I wonder if every time I left a house, I left a letter 

to say, here in this room a baby arrived home. 

I mourned my father looking out the bedroom window. 

I worried sitting here, and there, and yes, there too. 

A marriage failed in the house. 

But love surfaced on the front steps. 

I have loitered, the car engine panting, 

beside my first apartment with its vast ash tree knuckling 

the sidewalk, 

the home I fled to up in the hills, 

the rental on the edge of the raging 

Pacific—all that happened there— 

wondering who I was when I was alive inside 

and what remains. Our markings and notches like bruises 

covered in layers of paint.