Why They Sold the House
by
Pat Hanahoe-Dosch
Pat Hanahoe-Dosch
Pat Hanahoe-Dosch has an MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Harrisburg Area Community College, Lancaster campus. Her book, Fleeing Back, is available through futurecyclepress.org or Amazon.com
. Her poems have been published in The Paterson Literary Review, The Atticus Review, War, Art and Literature, Confrontation, The Red River Review, San Pedro River Review, and Marco Polo Arts Magazine, among many others. Her poem “A 21st Century Hurricane: An Assay” was recently nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize in Poetry. You can read some of her work online at pathanahoedosch.blogspot.com. Visit her website at phanahoedosch.weebly.com.
Here are the chips and cracks of what was spoken,
or was not. There is the quiet of her anger,
here, the hyperbolic breath, the inhalation of his carefully structured
indifference, and there, the cruelty of closed glass doors,
shut against the flowering dogwood and azaleas,
the backyard’s lush exhalation, oxygen puddles of sunlight
sparkling with static from the windows, the shutters, the aluminum
siding and other bits of the house that have ingested
the bitterness, glistening like an oil spill of his resentments,
her frustrations, and all the pinched words they finally let go,
and here is the way the house listens:
the water in the basement, the clogged toilets,
the leaking furnace, like blood
slowly leaking from a deep cut or brush burns seared across
arms and legs, or the purification of a leech
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