Here There Is No Home-Lee Uhen
Here There Is No Home
By Lee Uhen
Every day locks were
switched and rooms were lost
and mothers beat unrelenting doors,
cursed in bursts of primary colors
and pleaded, please,
I just want my food stamps.
Every eve I thanked no one
in particular for our light
bulb, the water that walked
from our faucet, the mattress,
the magnum whose
barrel I’d tasted; Saul too
often gone for me to miss, his
sweat on the pillow
as good as a kiss but I cannot
describe how difficult it is to make
love to a phantom
beneath the feet of domestic
disputes, with piss in the halls
and the baying of strays,
their cracked tongues and clammy
paws probing bolts and knobs for
enough dust to sate
them. So when I was told the Robert
Taylor homes had been renovated,
I truly was heartened:
the silence was an apology
to the girl in the Cadillac, to her
half-born child wrapped
in plastic bags and tossed out
the window, whom I found spine
bent and head
soft and viscous in my hands,
whom I buried as deep as fourteen
years allows and
who now, I fear, has been torn
from the ground, her bones
thrown out like refuse
with the dogs.
Copyright C. 2008 Lee Uhen