don’t look back

I watched cartoons on Saturdays and ate bagels on Sundays but the walls were uneven and the roof leaked and I was always at the doctor for something or other usually a headache thanks to mom and her ear-splitting silence and dad who blew straight through the house my eardrums simply pop-popped like bubble wrap mom wore an old floral nightgown with a raincoat on top to drive me to school and when she picked me up she was wearing the same outfit she said she hated laundry by which she meant me and the night weighed more than the day and that wasn’t the way it was supposed to be and the paint peeled and the lock broke and the TV needed to be smacked and Chris killed somebody behind the 7-11 and I don’t know what Sammy did but he was on the front page of the morning paper getting arrested and no one noticed that we left and it wouldn’t matter anyway because the longer we stayed the smaller we became and by the time we left we could fit easily through the keyhole but really we moved because the apple tree died and the clock stopped and mom looked at her watch and said it was time to go

Elisa Subin is a writer whose work has appeared in The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought, The Inflectionist Review, Club Plum, Not One of Us, 34 Orchard Literary Journal, CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly, and many others. Her chapbook, Departures, was published by Bottlecap Press. She won an Honorable Mention in the Reuben Rose Poetry Competition and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

A Song for Elisa