Lost House Index
7–Orchid air roots can reach throughout a room, like fingers twining other hands for sun.
16–Why don’t we keep glass Christmas balls in bowls in summer, to refine the heat.
37–Cliffs know how to build desert burrows like hollow gourds.
2—Once people stored drinking gloves in a drawer in their cars.
31—Clothing was two things, leather or cloth. If poor, you had grass.
4—The last California wolf spent years living in a museum vitrine, a diorama of chaparral hills painted behind him. There was no plastic and I can’t remember this.
15–Wind throws twilight down a meadow toward a house with no doors, clouds blowing through its skin, broken floorboards snapping at my feet.
27—A Viking ship engraved a passionate body, a metonym gone to sunrisen beast.
11–I want to walk through Stonehenge under ecclesiastical birds.
52—The dog next door cried over time with less exuberance, as if by crumpling in cubic pattern she could bound her terror in a shape of sounds.
26—Her owner unwrapped silent flowers that look like women’s geodes and are toxic. Cathedral meat hung from his rear view.
3—I saw a famous rock musician’s wife in a health food store, and without makeup she was so beautiful I wanted to be her, even to carry her sadness.
22—A white cedar horse alone in a chert field strung her neck along the fallow to smell my lips.
41—Plants taste different in animation than to people.
17–Hormones keep me melted.
9–Owls have a knowing look, like my father’s phosphorescence in his sixties at the bottom of his life, razored yet vigilant in his cast-off coat.
10–Weeds often sprout bridal feathers, to split light with their joy and anger.
Susan Nordmark‘s writing appears or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, and many other journals. Her work is anthologized in The Shape of a Poem, 2021. She lives in Oakland, California.
