25/30

I rub away clumps of eye-liner from below my lashes with the palm of my hand
and try to shake off the smell of everything still left in your house.
Your home in the Midwest, the one your father left for you on the edge of the bayou.
The one that has remained a burden on your conscience.
You are twenty-seven, a boy stuffed into the skin of a man.
A boy stuffed into the home of a sick man.

Your father, a hoarder of stuffing, has taken its toll on
the home on the edge of the bayou.
You remain standing on the crooked porch, stroking the oxidized brass numbers five and nine.
It is there that I realize that there are moments and moments
stuffed deep down inside of you, a denial that in a few short years the bayou will swell.
It will come to swallow the house whole, leaving you nothing, but the stuffings
of a boy still wondering what to do about the stuffings of a sick man.

-sonja lynn mata