by John Hilla
“Don’t take my house!” she screamed,
but she didn’t live inside.
This open door, kicked in, invites
all claims,
and hers was not the first.
Grandmother, Auntie cousins—all
waved hands on those shattered tiles
and moved forward through walls
to attic spaces one, two, nine
stories over this roof.
“Don’t take my house!”
She wrapped vines around her
neck and looped the ends around
the thought
that had-been things were always
things and that
streets eased between invisible walls
still radioed for light in windows.
“Don’t take my house!”
Ghosts can’t haunt what isn’t there.
***
John Hilla is a Detroit-area lawyer, writer, poet, and occasional musician. His poetry has been most recently published in The 3288 Review, The Cimarron Review, and The Bosphorous Review of Books. He is the author of the novel Stay Free, available where books are sold.
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