Applebee’s Summer
by Caroline Webster
I open a text “it feels like I either never left home or I’m never going back.” That’s the big empty West, or is it everywhere I’ve ever been, or is it the inside of this peculiar brown house, the green of which I so desperately cling to. I’d rather sit back against clapboard, my feet wrapped with weeds and tomatoes of the garden to scare away deer from sunup til late in the night, than live in the blanket-warm house: my parents argue their every inhalation— I don’t want that kind of pressure on my lungs. My brother lifeguards at the city pool— I don’t want that kind of sun on my neck. There’s a falling apart that happens to people and houses left silent. A cohort of ghosts shaking striped-wallpaper pipes,
Ernest Wishes
a ringing toilet that echoes in the ears. I curl up in dirt under the dining room window, darkened forest of mint encroaching on metal doors to the under home, nearby leaves of sickly basil easy to pinch at the stalk, peonies lolling heavy on their stems, heads down for the ants who crown them. There’s something nostalgic always in honeysuckle: elementary school’s wet wooden earth, creek racing tin foil boats, ground ivy bouquet, white clover wreath, my hair. Cilantro does not taste like soap: thirsty and spotted or fragrant and strong I will be a mother who grows her own herbs. Either I never left or I’m never going back but both ways I’m here and both ways I’m never getting out.
Rebecca Cobo LIBERTAS Vol. 26 No. 4
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