Sammie Downing

Welcome

I wish I could tell you, come in. But, you see, I haven’t cleaned up in a while. My grandmother taught me to dust and yet bits of myself surround. I wish I could say there are others on my shelves, run your fingers along spines and discover what another being left behind, a carbon trail to track.

In the porch light and falling dusk, surrounded by the itching call of cicadas—summer a glove too tight against my sweaty palms, I can’t rid myself of time and yet I don’t ever want to feel it—I wish I could say: welcome to my house. I built it myself. I learned to spread gravel grout with a flattened finger. that at night, before the walls went up, I sang in the living room and let my voice ring out. And yet, this is not true—there was never a house that exists of our own making. Yes I did build it but no, this is not the truth

Someone somewhere must have said you’re never only here. Stand at the window and recognize all the homes in which you are living. in centuries past, this room felt the quiver of buffalo breath as they bathed in beds of mud. a millennia away and I’d be staring at the sea, flesh on fire as Iguanodons marched through sand into night and back out again. Even before, this house of ours was underwater. stand inside and ears pop, throats close. ghost layers of time piled on top of me while I slept until I drowned without the ability to explain exactly why I couldn’t breathe

I believed recitation lay in lips of cardboard cities I constructed. in prairies and swamps—among live oaks and winter ravenous rain—they fit neatly into the backseat of the car or the awning of an alley. It was in these fortresses that I said “come in, all are welcome here. I don’t care what it is your soul consents to so long as I am very, very far away.” but when someone answered my invitation, entered me, I discovered hollow. I grew deaf from my own echo until numbly I never heard myself just the wind bellow in a paper structure. our city rotted from rain, flattened to the gutter and yet I was on my hands and knees. desperate to crawl back in. don’t.make.me.go.home. this emptiness belongs to me.

If you come inside you won’t see this. Perhaps you’ll see the deer pelt and you won’t know what it means. I might never find words to tell you. You might see the books, how could you not? I want you to know this house fell on me and now my legs are broken. I built it and yet that’s not couldn’t possibly ever be true.

Do you know how desperately I wish I could say, enter. here. even the imagined touch of your hand sends shutters slamming. stricken against any rain. But I burn to go to the window throw out my hands let my palms grow wet

- Sammie Downing