Julia Lisella

Demolition

The weed had wrapped itself in through the chain link fence between our houses
and as we talked we pulled—we might have been weaving
but as it was, we were unweaving, untangling, pulling a thread, tendrils,
throwing them behind us as we went. We managed it down to the roots,
thick as tree branches beneath the fence, rock solid. We didn’t fall as we pulled it
though we thought we would, each gripping a piece, proud of our work.

Some years later she stood in my yard, only the second or third time she’d been there
after 20 years as neighbors and told me she didn’t want to live
with any of her children. Weeks later, she was gone. 

The house is blowing itself apart now it seems, layer by layer,
this week the roof came off. The construction crew sat
on what was once the front stoop. I want to remember it,
the steps were made of stone, the house white with blue trim?
The railings wrought iron, the base crumbling cement.
Her irises in the front yard always the first of the season. 

Now as I pass, the walls down, siding gone, the door an elephant’s eye
I can see into, skeleton of the house, floors floating, all gone, I say to the crew
and they seem proud, relieved, a long day. I glimpse a railing
they haven’t knocked down yet, stained dark brown. It seems almost
a body, almost her, climbing down, chasing a child
collecting rent from the tenant downstairs.

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Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems, Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), was named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her other collections include Always, Terrain, and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Mom Egg Review and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the IAWA Literary Reading Series in Boston. For more, see www.julialisellapoetry.com.