No.84, Kirsty A. Niven

This house has seen everything,
these four walls our witness.
The peeling wallpaper recalls
each house guest, each event.

The door still feels every knock,
the letterbox each regurgitated bill.
The hall each muddy footstep
tracked in and never cleaned up.

The living room could tell tales
of jelly tots at Christmas and broken lamps,
of Mummy movie marathons and kicked cats;
of birthdays that always ended in tears.

The kitchen knows about it all,
the burnt cooking and cat-napped fish suppers.
Dinner parties that turned into disasters
at the sticky table that always creaked.

The utility room rumbles at remembered cycles,
laughing about the lazy boiler
that only worked when shoved
and hummed the whole time.

The winding stairs still chuckle,
when they think of every sock slide,
noting the dents where tailbone met step.
The carpets frayed by kitty claws.

The bedroom on the right,
the backdrop to every fight.
Never painted and musty,
crumbled with clipped nails and hairballs.

The bedroom on the left, the study,
with its vomit stained carpet.
Eternally bathed in the computer’s light,
my dad worshipping at the download altar.

The bathroom with its holey ceiling.
Blue. Yellow. Green. A horror to be seen.
The toilet bowl still haunted
by the acrid fat of diet pills.

The last bedroom, narrow and mine,
sawdust scented from guinea pig,
aquamarine exactly, migraine inducing,
with its crescent moon hole in the plaster.

It is the narrator of my childhood.

 

© Kirsty A. Niven 

Kirsty A. Niven’s poems have appeared in Eros: A Collection of Poetry and Prose on Desire and The Eroti. She is based in Dundee, Scotland where she lives with her husband Gav and their three cats Orson, Finn and Kairi. She is a graduate of the University of Dundee.

Twitter: @kirsty_kobrakid
Instagram: @glimmerlikebolan
Website: https://wutheringmites.wordpress.com/

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