“Bugs: Interlude” by Elizabeth Sackett

this

vast empty old skull of a house

aching and pure,

like a hollow note

is only a mayfly,

a week and some

clumsy days

with a neat wooden porch,

empty bedrooms,

suitcases i lug up stairs with my

arms straining like frayed rope,

a fine clean coffee machine,

wide spoons and nothing dark flitting

around the new yellow fruit we place

on the counter, a fridge full

of clear cold spaces,

a cored out nook for reading,

perfected with two blue chairs

and a pile of dissonant vintage books.

the brown marmorated stink bugs

are the only strangers, and are they that

when each time we visit this house

there they are, their round backs

braced in firm approach, like intricately

carved shields, black and brown

with ivory filagree? i let one cross my finger,

graceful little soldier, old friend, a sign

of brief escape.

they are comparatively unobtrusive

houseguests, easily forgotten

in the odd, foal-kneed routine

of morning, silence, sidewalks

chalk-beige, of rain, blanket,

heat filling the house like blood,

long showers, white counters

enveloping my small stupid potions

in their cupped hands,

my father calling my phone. sometimes his voice

is as fermented as the rest of him,

sometimes as steady as stone, so

sad and secure that i forget

the foundations around him are dissolving

into so many pieces of slimy gray life

and i forget about the clean, persistent

stinkbugs too, until, in the middle of the night,

i hear one loping around the room,

knocking and flitting drunkenly into corners,

all the louder

for the surrounding dark.

Elizabeth Sackett's work has appeared in such publications as Neon Literary Magazine, A Door is a Jar, Wild Musette, The Literary Nest, and Mythridate. She spends her free time thinking up unhinged metaphors, and her professional time wrangling artists at a local gallery.