The afternoon is a slow animal dying on the floor.
Its breath is the dust-mote spiral in the window-gold.
I am told to build a house here. To use the good, square bricks
of a sensible tomorrow. My mortar is mixed with milk and honey
and the fine, white ash of all the letters I did not send.
This is the arithmetic of becoming: one plus one equals a corridor
with a door at the end. The door is a mouth that only opens inward.
My mother’s hands are two brown sparrows stitching the hem of the sky
to the edge of the field. Her back is a bridge over a tired river.
She asks for no monument, only that the rice grows tall.
My hunger is a different seed. It dreams of being a sharp, black thorn,
a forgotten god asleep in the red muscle of the earth.
I prepare the daily meal of minutes. I sweep the shadows into neat piles.
But the walls are wet clay. They weep a slow, salt water.
Things push through from the other side—not roots, but questions
in a grammar of green fracture. A vine writes a fugitive text
across the prescribed geometry of ceiling.
They gave me a key and said it was for freedom.
It fits only the lock on the jar where my voice is kept in formalin,
a pale, curled specimen. It hums a frequency of marrow and cut wire.
At night, I press my ear to the glass. The sound is not a song,
but the static between stations, the raw frequency of is and is not.
Love, they said, would be a courtyard with a clear fountain.
Instead, it is the weather in the room. A pressure.
The feeling of a word—you, you, you—forming on the tongue like a blister,
then dissolving into the common air. It is the heavy scent of jasmine
from a garden I cannot own, only haunt.
So I build the second house. Not with brick, but with the refusal of brick.
Its beams are made of sustained glances. Its foundation is the tremor in the blood.
Here, the door is a wound that opens both ways. The furniture is carved from what if.
The windows are eyes plucked from a peacock’s fan, seeing every direction at once.
It is a criminal structure. It violates every code.
The slow animal of the afternoon finally bleeds out. The sky turns its violet page.
I am two women now: one pours water from the well, her sari a blue sigh.
The other stands in the doorway of the illegal house, a lit match in her hand.
Her shadow is long and thirsty. It drinks the last of the light.
Tomorrow, they will come with their measuring tapes, their clean ledgers.
They will note the solid house, the straight smoke from the chimney.
They will not see the watermark, the persistent damp shape on the stone,
the outline of the other house, the one built of breath and burnt paper,
the one where I am already living,
the one where I am already
gone.
between the rotting walls 
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