Crooked Here
By Heather Cadenhead

I.

Our kitchen cabinets are painted a gluey white that must be covering years of dust and hand prints and paint coats and spilled grease. This is our first house, an old house, and I wonder which surfaces other couples made love on before us. We've kept to the bed—tried the couch once, but it was uncomfortable. I hear about couples doing it on kitchen counters and dining room tables, in bathtubs and on tile floors.

II.

There's a Japanese maple in the backyard, branches spreading thick over the garden like a tent at a wedding reception. The only things missing are the hot-white paper lanterns, flashing silhouettes of our bodies back at us.

III.

There's a nice white couple that lives next to us, and they have a black baby. I see them out on the porch sometimes, playing with their baby. They got pot lights installed in their porch ceiling and, when they move, it shines down on them like colored lights shine down on actors in a play scene. Sometimes, I applaud from the window, soundless.

IV.

There are little dips and curves in our hardwood floors, places where the bookshelf or coffee table doesn't sit right—and we move, and move, until we finally say it's the floor and leave it like it is, crooked but here.

Heather Cadenhead is a recent graduate of Union University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Illuminations, READ THIS, The Ampersand Review, Up the Staircase, Wilderness House Literary Review, and others. She resides in Memphis, Tennessee, with her husband and their dog Arthur.

© 2009 prickofthespindle.com