the house my daughter was born in

I know the roof is leaking.
I’m supposed to go home and see how bad it is.
The storm isn’t helping and I can hear the thunder in my sleep.
I walk in the back door through the kitchen.
The house is just like we left it except the second floor has become the bottom floor.
The empty gray rooms bleed together; and it feels like mine.
The ceiling is pulsing and caving in, holding a swimming pool above my head. Culminating at the center of this massive bulge is a single drip.
How much can this ceiling hold?
The sheetrock rips from the wall, like paper ripping from a seam.
(I think I covered my ears.)
I’m drenched and up to my knees in water.
Whole pieces of sheetrock are floating around me with thousands of chrysalides stuck to them.
I wade in and out.
Leaves are sprouting up from the sheetrock and eggs/larva are spontaneously appearing.
Caterpillars are moving and molting between the leaves.
Then hardening themselves into chrysalides.
And no sooner, transforming into butterflies.
All in an instant over and over and over.
I’m in a time-lapse and a freeze frame at the same time.
Everything moves like a quirky hypotonic newborn, the things that move at all.
Some butterflies fly through the holes in the leaky roof.
They have somewhere to be.
I witness in wonder and that is all.

Exponential metamorphosis.

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