My three-floor house is my own ghetto.
The garden is overgrown with weeds and soul-eating plants.
As a boy, I played there, was stuck by the thorns of a rosebush.
I never ventured in the basement for fear of skeletons.
My father completed his wood shop projects there.
He always wanted a son who was good with his hands.
As a boy, I played pranks–turned off the lights while he was sanding a rocking horse of rough oak. I avoided the attic
for fear of ghosts who would trap me with their life stories.
My mother, the seamstress,lived there in fear of my father’s tantrums. Years later, next to the dress she finished
for an unborn daughter, I found her pulseless
with a queer smile, blanched face.
The living room was a safer bet.
And later, my father, seeing my mother in me,
attacked me with a butcher’s knife.
Even after he died,
I stayed locked in the bathroom,
thought of the ghosts, my ex-selves,
floating through this house.
They might form a gang and start a riot.
I’ll have to move uptown and leave my family behind,
the house for foreclosure.