Birmingham
Poetry
Review
How a House is Never Clean
Cleaning, days ago, hauling in plantsfrom the fate of a frost's warning,
I discovered a long-dead bat
among the framed photos of family.
It had dies weeks before, curled in
on itself, it's wings dried to a husk
about a slight body little more
than lint. It had left a stain
on the wood, long soaked in, oily
and evaporated, a hair or two stuck
against the paint.
Or the flies, like hairy raisins
near window frames, burnt out
on revving the glass. Or the fruit
flies clustered behind the toaster,
asterisks among the crumbs.
Their death remarkable only
for their common accidents,
the mundane drop into corners
untrod. How a house gathers
death about it—into corners
and edgess, how it reveals where
we do not clean, how unclean
death is, how common, how base.
Oranges pushing in on themselves
in a crisper, milk churning with rot,
spider plants browning from thrips
and sala, the air shedding its load
of skin and pollen.
--Gabriel Welsch
Gabriel Welsch's poems, stories, review, and essays appear widely. The author of the poetry collection, Dirt and All Its Dense Labor, he lives in State College, PA with his wife and daughter.
