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Poetry by Alex Brown

accursed house

white and purple flowers lined

the cracked and sloping driveway.

the architect — the husband — died there.

i looked for his ghost, but he never showed.

not visibly, anyway; maybe he showed

in the way the house shook

like it was built on something hollow.

the tobacco-yellowed walls, the kitchen light that buzzed

and was so ugly i thought it was beautiful.


maybe he showed in the way, for a summer,

i became so obsessed with my blood that spun

around in centrifuges somewhere

in places like san luis obispo

in the way the scent of summer-melted asphalt

mingled with my lavender deodorant — so fourteen years old --

and started to smell like leukemia — these are the things i can’t explain --

my body splayed out on my grandmother’s four-poster bed,

i would’ve carved all those hippocratic designations

into the house if i had been able to find anything sharp enough


years later we sold the house to flippers,

people who would take this shell of a home and make it worth something.

all their intentions spilled out of their mouths --

rip out the wine-colored carpets, the buzzing light, make all the countertops

granite and the walls fresh white like glittering teeth,

like a geode shattered open


the asphalt doesn’t melt in the summer anymore.

they repaved the roads and whatever family they are able

to usher in won’t know everything that i can’t explain

that happened in that house

until all the protection spells

i laid with my cards and candles fade away
and it all seeps in
up from the ground like poison.



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Alex Brown is an undergraduate Creative Writing student at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. She writes creative nonfiction and reported stories and loves queer narratives, illness memoirs, and chai lattes. More of her written work can be found at http://alexbrown.agnesscott.org/published, and she can be found on twitter at @violinwitch.
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