The Lives of Houses

Houses are so disloyal
the moment you leave one behind
as if they could scarcely wait to evict you
they begin shuffling windows and doors and
painting the sashes red or green and
uprooting trees and leaving unattended
foreign cars in the driveway
so pull if you must into memory lane
but know
all those years of making love and
eating sushi beneath that sheltering roof
may have represented
from your house’s perspective
nothing more than a termite invasion.









Darrell Petska’s writing appears in Blast Furnace, The Tule Review, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Red Paint Hill and numerous other journals. Darrell cut short his career as a university publications editor to be the arbiter of his own words. He now is, in Madison, Wisconsin.

See another poem in issue 4.3