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Pick a novel of your choice and move in. Hang your shirts between pages 35 and 36. The kitchen spans from 107 to 112, and your bed is between the epilogue and the notes. The bigger the book, the more pages to keep clean. Settle for the novella or even the children’s book tucked away in the basement of some moldy library—these are ok. A flood will only warp your home, reposition your living room and rearrange the furniture. Your decorating is malleable. Grandma walked through the turnip fields before she moved into her sister’s copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese. Father’s farm yielded bonbons and coffee cakes; they fed the pigs taffy and string cheese, and the geese kept up the accounts, books as crisp as apple pie. She couldn’t find the bathroom in her new home. The serifs tripped her up in the darkness of the spine. Kept her money in the china closet. Wild, dreamy afternoons glowed like a peach. Desert breathing got easier with her naps at 2pm. She hated looking at the moon with all of its warts and marbling. “The melon that never rots,” she said one Tuesday night. If she talked about church with company, they would find out she goes just to make eyes at the retired bishop. He says hello, asks about the family, but never thinks beyond her blue skirt with the yellow flowers. Instead, I hear about what his breath might sound like if he spent the night. She wouldn’t think about the moon. She would make him pancakes with real butter the next morning. How convinced she is that he will still delight in the rubble of her body. She wants to pant and come alive like Browning, a rebellion against gravity and time. After their storm, the pages won’t be so stiff. |
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Justine Nolt is a recent Austin, Texas resident with a passion for avant-garde art and good beer. She graduated from Eastern Mennonite University in 2018 with a degree in Writing Studies and enjoys writing image-heavy poetry. When she’s not writing or serving food at Chuy’s, she can be found knitting, collecting art, or appreciating fine cheese. |
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