In the dream, I wept as your family packed
personal effects into open boxes. Everywhere I looked
I saw lingering evidence of our existence there. Photos and
paintings, some of which I watched you make as I smoked
naked in the beds. The plants were all dying.
I feel your annoyance, even now. The house
was never mine. But it felt like you, which
made it home. An endless variety of surfaces, and one
hundred secret rooms. Carpeted closets and freestanding
bathtubs. Furniture aged and worn, intricate scrolling,
inappropriate metals. A house somehow, in a way,
like you. Strangely charmed.
The old mansion and all of the grandiosity
it both promised and also sometimes delivered
is no longer in your bloodline. I wonder who is.
Fractals and nudibranch and warm water.
An eyelash for every time I wished to have you
back. She was a curator of all things. Her hair
is everywhere I’ve ever slept. A woman like a four-poster bed,
a handful of sequins, acrylic paint, and fish bones.
My feet remember how to step around a bedroom like a minefield.
My hands still smell like butane and graphite.
A vagrant of the universe, fortune’s darling—she
was a genre all her own. Old paperback novels and floral
fabrics, dismantled furniture and unbound drawings. Beauty,
but also, disarray. Her world was my peace.
Moons and moons and moons
have waxed and waned above us. Oh Eva,
who knows how many different types of
popcorn plaster have kept watch over you
while you slept.
But tonight, on a rooftop in Silver Lake,
clad in only string lights and prayer flags,
the pleasure is mine.
Cierra Lowe-Price, 2022