Aloha, Oregon
KRISTEN VALENSKI
I.
My mother bought the house on 32nd street
because a psychic told her to.
A vision of a window spattered with
mountains of gold and flints of red.
I do not remember this house,
even when we drove past
the thin leaning wood fence
twitching like an irritated tail.
The house I grew up in, they said.
A small white shack distant relative
of a cottage hidden behind a ghost pasture,
fields of speckled grey Arabians and Chestnuts
grazing on marigolds and dry grass.
II.
There was a crack house in our neighborhood,
down the road, they say.
Did you know?
No, I didn’t know.
The families grew tired of dealers
taking shady business to their neighborhood.
Parents took turns guarding the condemned building,
armed with rifles, hot cocoa from their wives,
badges of children’s stickers pinned onto their gun slings.
The pink house round the bend a woman your mom’s age
lived in, had a three year old kid.
He was playing with Hot Wheels in his room
when his mother was raped in the living room.
Never caught the guy.
III.
Aloha, there is no place like you.
No pastoral setting hidden among bleak blankets
Of deciduous trees, spinal needles quivering
At the tremble of early Oregon rain.
The white shack near the pasture fence,
thin metal strung between rotten poles,
brushed against rolling mountains of wildflowers,
a bucket of oats and a knotted bracelet of baby’s breath,
a white sanctuary coveted in crowns of daisies.
Marigolds.
KRISTEN VALENSKI
I.
My mother bought the house on 32nd street
because a psychic told her to.
A vision of a window spattered with
mountains of gold and flints of red.
I do not remember this house,
even when we drove past
the thin leaning wood fence
twitching like an irritated tail.
The house I grew up in, they said.
A small white shack distant relative
of a cottage hidden behind a ghost pasture,
fields of speckled grey Arabians and Chestnuts
grazing on marigolds and dry grass.
II.
There was a crack house in our neighborhood,
down the road, they say.
Did you know?
No, I didn’t know.
The families grew tired of dealers
taking shady business to their neighborhood.
Parents took turns guarding the condemned building,
armed with rifles, hot cocoa from their wives,
badges of children’s stickers pinned onto their gun slings.
The pink house round the bend a woman your mom’s age
lived in, had a three year old kid.
He was playing with Hot Wheels in his room
when his mother was raped in the living room.
Never caught the guy.
III.
Aloha, there is no place like you.
No pastoral setting hidden among bleak blankets
Of deciduous trees, spinal needles quivering
At the tremble of early Oregon rain.
The white shack near the pasture fence,
thin metal strung between rotten poles,
brushed against rolling mountains of wildflowers,
a bucket of oats and a knotted bracelet of baby’s breath,
a white sanctuary coveted in crowns of daisies.
Marigolds.