Many Houses

I will lie and say I do not remember it all –
the creek-bed behind my grandmother’s home,
the fragile sight of deer on the road,
their legs moving like ice across water,
the way I would stretch my palms out wide
and try to cover the sun, lying there in the grass,
a thing waiting to be buried.
I am a child marching towards death,
Lot’s wife the moment before the turn.
I do not dream about it, but if I did
I would be placed right in center of it all
made soft by time and age,
and there would be no horsemen,
no hand broached down from the sky
only the second before the deer was there
and the moment after it had gone,
unharmed, into some part of the world I could not see.
The door will open on its own, a screen blown in
by a summer storm, and I will be able to feel it
thick against my skin – every contact, every mark of pain,
like a hand passing through water
until she turns around to see me,
and it will all disappear, washed down current
carried away into some greater flood.

By Oona Mackinnon-Hoban

Oona Mackinnon-Hoban is a senior at Barnard College, graduating this spring with a degree in English. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine and now lives in New York City.