StrangeLens, responder

Teardown: Arlington, Virginia

Lori Rottenberg

I.
We live in a place of stale-guilt, dry-bones—
the Clovis and Powhatan evacuated
for us long ago, the forests of pine, cypress,
cedar, hickory, walnut
long-cleared, the colonial aristocrats ceding
to yeoman farmers who sold
to purveyors of the brick-box American Dream.
Our land abuts the navel
of the universe, so close people hock
the sweet fruit of their next
30 years to live here, so close
to others I can see
what my neighbor watches after
dinner and smell when he’s overcooked
his steak on the grill. Our economy’s information;
we don’t have to dwell in unpleasantries:
scorched rainforests, glowing noxious
refineries, buried toxins
where the contents of my handy blue and black
county bins wind up.

Lori Rottenberg, caller

Keys

It was my first glimpse of her
insanity: I lost them and was exiled,
not because I couldn’t get in—
my mother was there to receive me,
an unexpected pope who I’d hoped
would issue comfort and absolution.

Yet her prayers were not for me
but the keys—that despite their anonymity,
they would lead malevolence to our doorstep.
She sent me to walk the decaying town alone
until sunset, crying and feeling with my hands and knees
like a penitent on the lawn of the elementary school

until I found their sharp, familiar
curves beneath my fingers. I plodded
back home in the dark, still alone,
happy to have found what I needed
but no longer sure the keys led
to where I was supposed to go.

II.
My husband says this place will be a teardown.
No one wants to save these
walls. The peach and brown penny tiles
of the hall bath, the tiny white
and pink squares of the master headed
to a landfill, the hopeful yellow
metal cabinets of the kitchen that showed
aproned housewives the promise
of tomorrow will be twisted and torn in the jaws
of the excavator, maybe saved
for scrap metal if we find the right
contractor, a little more conscientious than the rest.
The honeyed pine of the basement
is to be splintered and interred, left to rot
in its landfill tomb.
The roof replaced two decades
ago will be shredded and buried,
along with the new windows, useless
now, a shame, into the trash
they go, their shattering tinkling like bells
tolling. The sturdy rows
of ranch bricking to be chewed by stronger
teeth, broken—so easy,
so easy, so easy. Just like throwing
the takeout tins in the trash.
Take it away and start over!
The world is new again
and ours to remake; all it takes is gold,
and we will live forever:
for us, there will always be the next round,
we can buy a new gameboard.