the carpet from your childhood closet
is ridden with memories of you. there are fibers
from a baseball glove, crumbs from candy that fell
from your pockets, flakes of mud you once tracked inside
after running to escape a sudden thunderstorm;
all awash with traces of your dna
from the oils of your skin: liquid memory,
concrete evidence of you.

a piece of bark, a shred of leaf, fell
from the still-strong tree you used to climb.
the wooden house is rotting. the tiles crack
above the floor that sags into the hollow ground,
the ground beneath your closet breaks as the whole place
caves, or is bulldozed, or burned.

it's thermodynamics, really.
all this texas clay, you say, is unwavering
in its strength. but every rock of that hard dirt
contains a piece of you: a fiber of your carpet,
caked with mud and bits of baseball,
or a piece of decomposed bark from the tree
you used to climb. a ceramic shard, even,
from the tile you'd skid across,
makes this dirt something more than dirt,
makes it unsagging texas clay.


-bronnie


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