Foundation by Jessica Cuello

I turned five years old

forty years ago and sat

on the back steps waiting

for my father   for a visit

 

Waiting for his last visit

my back to the house

on the gravel steps

where the railing rusted

 

loose in the cement    rusted

off and the house was

condemned      When the landlord

died     the metal and gravel crumbled

 

back into earth      crumbled

into dust except the basement

stayed behind     still intact

Even in the ancient

 

world      outlines of ancient

houses stay        Tourists kneel

on the ground to touch the sites  

Mostly they make a single visit

---

Jessica Cuello is the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016), Hunt (The Word Works, 2017), and several chapbooks. She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award (for Pricking), The 2016 Washington Prize (for Hunt), The New Letters Poetry Prize, and a Saltonstall Fellowship. Her newest poems can be found or are forthcoming in Passages North, Crab Orchard Review, Transom, Foundry, The Missouri Review, The American Poetry Journal, and Red Paint Hill.