Kúghą/Home

In the outskirts in a room on the second floor he slept and woke.
—Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, tr. by Will Petersen

my boyhood home became periphery because of its location

eight miles away from town, the house I grew up in now empty

burrows inside a thicket of forest left pockmarks on the hillside

inside the thicket remained an empty cask, a remnant of my thick body

which has now become the shape of a log of wood rot

—then, no one could hear

the arguments and screams, only the echoes that reverberated through

the tree limbs and leaned against my inner ear becoming part

of the silhouetted tree line

outside along a small embankment next to the empty house where I

used to lie sideways with my head nearest the ground —where I watched

the soldier beetles carelessly roam below the swaying parabola

of slumping sunflowers, where a clump of sod imprints a lasting smudge

I return to the vacant house occasionally to stand on the embankment

still imprinting in my facial skin, transfusing —then I think of the room

now my body, a rooted rotted waste of immersing follicles

against my hairline weaving the forgotten voices and somnolent soil

not forgetting the line which is my forest that forever becomes

—the outskirts of my home

Notes:

“Kúghą /Home” appears in Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2022) by Crisosto Apache and is reprinted here with the permission of Gnashing Teeth Publishing.

Source: Poetry (September 2022)