House Clearance of the Dead by Grant Tarbard

I was the house with stewed walls, patched with my
mother’s challenging liver suppers. A
poet’s house with milky tea and dry sponge cake.
I was the window that bred mould in the
bedroom I stared out of as a puppy,
a scene scented with nimbly discarded
pornography and hushed with lavender
oil. Once, in the death of the day, two sweet-
hearts fucked in a car beneath my window.
The girl’s squeals and pants steamed the windshield, the
unstirring midnight swayed to her gull chants.
Now, I am a house clearance of the dead,
nameless with borrowed clothes, gardens grow out
of my head. The notes I hum fall as stones.

Grant Tarbard is the author of the newly released Loneliness is the Machine that Drives this World (Platypus Press). Follow him on Twitter at @GrantTarbard.