DEMOLITION, 3:17 P.M.
Once the excavator takes the front wall,
the house becomes honest about its rooms.

Second floor:
pink wallpaper,
a brass bed frame,
one sock behind the radiator.

First floor:
green tile,
a sink still holding
the shape of its faucet in rust.

The stairs run upward
and end in weather.

People stop on the sidewalk.

We are suddenly allowed
to see where strangers slept.

A bedroom wall has pencil marks
beside the doorway:

MAYA 6
MAYA 7
MAYA 8 1/2

The half is underlined twice.

The machine bites the kitchen.

A cabinet opens
without anyone touching it.
Three blue plates fall forward
and break where the stove was.

Dust crosses the street
and settles on our cars.

For twenty minutes,
a square of bathroom wallpaper
hangs by itself—

small yellow herons
standing in blue reeds—

while everything around it
is sorted into wood,
metal,
plaster,
trash.

The excavator turns.

The wallpaper lifts once
in the bucket’s wind,

showing the white wall
that had been behind it
for however many years,

then tears clean
from the top.