Old Madge’s Divination Guide to Home Décor: Living Room

She knows the rules: twenty minutes of work, no more
or less, then stand away and see. This time, a bear’s

shape looms out of the bare patch in the wall’s skin,
the scab of paint scraped away. This is a bad sign,

a truly grizzled invective. As though this wall has
something to say. Madge can’t pretend she doesn’t know

what. She looks to her gun, to her boiling pot and swift
of jars. She looks to her archives and so does the bear.

This is not the sign of wisdom, or her great ursa mother.
The wall recommends an end to bats and broth,

to the rack of dire solutions and knocks at the door
at dusk. Madge will not beggar a reckoning now, pockets

a vial, knows all of its failures. The moment
when it comes (the when unspecified, the bear’s edges

too hazy) will approach sharp and replete with teeth.
Madge plants her feet like a trunk and waits.

One Day, Old Madge’s House Goes Silent

I tried indulgence—pennies
counted and sealed into the floor.
I tried sponging films, fogs
over the pale green of the living
room walls. Rotating lamp
shades. An articulation of music
boxes. The house is dead

to me, still, speaks nothing, chills
even the mice into the cotton
torn from my towels. I can’t read
these holes, either. I have broken
all the jars going spare. Unreeled
the worst cassettes over the floor.
Downtown, on the library’s machines,

I zoom deep, click by click, to the roof,
the widow’s peak of it pointing angry
in the woods. The house swallowed
its witness. No children will move
me into another dumb home. No fellow
aunties to raise their voices in every
answer, to pronounce “Sister”

into my ear. The cat hears the same
ghosts as always, communes with its six
past selves. In decades past, alone
meant alone. Whose forgiveness
was I meant to beg?