Orphanage
by Jesse Caverly
All these places I've lived yet none I made a home.
Nothing hung on walls, no totems on the mantle. Not even a welcome mat.
Furniture as afterthought, useful objects, not heirlooms.
I’ve been running scared, running long, running game,
anxious to get to the next pin on the map,
cuz to be in the journey is excruciating.
Presence of mind is to be with the noise,
with the voices, the calculated whispers:
—Your worth is pennies on the dollar, homeboy.
She’s gonna realize you are feral, you are an animal draped
in the skin of the boy you wolfed down from the inside out.
—But I ate him to spare him his agony. I wear his tanned skin
cuz there will come a time when I will vomit him back up, flesh and viscera,
to pack him back into his husk.
Press into his limbs armature, branches of oak so that he can carry himself.
Animate his manikin. Place his eyes back within sockets of wax.
Stitch his seams together with twine.
Prop him against a tree until the blood returns, the pins and needles
recede and he can move on his own accord.
Where will I go—
All these places I’ve lived and never made home. Perhaps the studio apartment on
H street, hollow chamber of chipped windowsills and 70s era linoleum,
burrow to rats and Haverhill fever.
Perhaps the house in the alleyway, worn carpet with a case of alopecia,
those octagonal crystal door knobs that kept falling out of doors
when slammed and so many were slammed.
Perhaps the loft, arched with cavernous ceilings, where the photographer
did her best to make it home, for us, but I was not at home in me.
And perhaps the boy will visit on occasion. Show me the sutures healed,
scar tissue ebbing away, small dots where I threaded them together.
Coming into focus as a being, flesh and blood
made a crib for the spirit. His range of motion now
an expanding arc and radius as
he finds his way in the world I kept from him.
I hope he won’t hate me, but boys know animus,
they have imaginary friends with teeth.
I hope he won’t hate me, cuz I was the place he lived in
but could not call home.
Jesse Caverly was born an hour outside of Boston, but he and his mother quickly became nomads. He doesn't remember much about Tucson and everything about Hawaii. There, he had a small white terrier as a pet. There, he collected comic books and ate guavas fresh off the branch. Then they moved to California, high school was all right, college didn’t happen, but life did. He is now a storyteller, proud father of a wilding, and an occasional poet. He resides in Arcata, Humboldt County.
