Status Updates From House A

im not on page 1 but BACHELARD

"If we could trace such a system of invisible dimensions, unearth / an inheritance of fractures and cracks, we would know once and for all how / decades have no margins, oceans do not stop."

"Children of immigrants gather bits / of wire, thread, a safety pin; they arrange them like a blueprint, not knowing / why or how they know the shape."

"No one told me that if I left, there would always / be a reason to return."

"Third is a world embalmed in field artefacts. Her mother and father opening / doors, looking for something to hold the moon."

"a poetics of hung laundry, mild-hearted / plants atop cold tile floors, her mother's / half-reflection in a morning window. / weave together a contradiction of / silences and angles, grainy and soft."

"'and when the seeping starts, the house / is already completed.'"

"'not in the thing itself but in the / patterns of shadows': an after-effect / that splinters over everything."

"repetitions, recurrences, retellings. i / keep them inside recycled jars: acorn, / paper star, tiny pinecone. / 'a house constitutes a body of images.'"

"... and when my parents gave me their history lessons, they were always intimate, a personal language of the body, so I knew that facts and tenderness weren't separate things but came mixed together, like a glass of cloudy lemon-tea."

"... and when my parents gave me their history lessons, they were always intimate, a personal language of the body, so I knew that facts and tenderness weren't separate things but came mixed together, like a glass of cloudy lemon-tea."

"Dear Mao,
Architectural palimpsest: a layer of skin I am inclined to peel."

"I would say—Lost: my fingernail moon. Lost: the dark spot inside my mother's throat. Lost: house inside my seams."

"We could call this How to Build an American Home, or History Lessons, or even Dislocated Objects (misplaced nostalgia, broken cotton slippers, a shelf of souvenir dolls in slow wave sleep)."

"So that ours was always a story of leaving and never an anchoring of place."