Photo by Edouard TAMBA on Unsplash
Dear God, I don’t want to think of the stray approaching the food bowl and finding no food.
I don’t want to think of the deck wallpapered in wet leaves when it rains,
dry death when the air cools and the sun shines for too many days.
I don’t want to think of the basement with its hard underbelly
and exercise equipment shivering in one corner,
the leaky faucet that kept my sleepovers awake,
the fluorescent lights that buzzed and suffocated bugs.
I don’t want to think of the patch of me
in the bedroom
two down from the hallway bath,
what the garbage disposal
could not
dispose of.
I don’t want to think of the woman passing girlhood-somewhere
thinking,
I remember that this place hurts
but why?
Dear God,
I don’t want to think.
Christine Naprava is a writer from South Jersey. Her poems have appeared in Contrary Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, Outcast Press, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Sledgehammer Lit, The Lunch Break Zine, and The Daily Drunk, among others.