Our childhood faces linger, pictured
oddly angled, dowdy, candid,
vowels of cheese tucked in the smiles,
snapped here when temperamental,
there, braced upright on a carousel,
our hair and clothes in coarse-cut styles.
We look abstract, defenseless,
not yet anchored in our growing senses…
were those hangers-on ourselves?
The same who left at seventeen,
renouncing where they’d always been,
to manage happenstance themselves?
Yes. Here we sit, same cloth, same pattern,
grown through married time to learn
the construct of inheritance—
its inward arch, the merging of
its common rooms, the aura’s cling,
our leasehold on a cryptic manse.
— from Juniper Volume 7, Issue 3