PASSAGE

(c) 09/11/2021

An eight-foot stretch of green shag flanked

by celery colored walls left unadorned

by family photos or one of Grandmother’s paintings

of the orchard or a forest.

One brass and rubber doorstop.

The hallway was an in-between place.

A place where the living passed through

on their way to live somewhere else.

The living room raucous with saxophone or drums

and bursting accusations of infidelity.

And the kitchen, while no one ever cooked

a decent meal we all foraged for popcorn,

licorice, a can of soda or two. For the grown-ups, beer.

There was enough yet we all felt some form of scarcity

letting out war yelps and yells as we claimed our food.

That hallway was all about passage and nothing more

from the kitchen past the bathroom and to Momma’s bedroom

where silence pervaded like a stench of rotting onion.

If noise is an indication of living, then no one lived in that bedroom.

Sometimes I saw it, a shape like a woman passing from obligation

to the bathroom where water in all it’s forms

could hydrate a husk back to life and redeem a soul any sin.

I always turned away and looked over my shoulder

over the red linoleum tile, the yellow table and out

to the neighbor’s lilac bush overhanging our fence.

And there I saw the possibility of a way out

tenuous and so fragile I was afraid for years to take it.