The second time my father bought a house
and moved us, we had grown comfortable
in the old one. The gold carpet,
the wrought iron railing,
the turquoise kitchen appliances.
I was at college when the moving van backed up
the driveway and they pulled away, waving.
I remember the wave goodbye from the first move,
the girl across the street with her sad face
at the car window. My father picked me up
in June after I graduated and drove me home—although
I couldn’t call it home and never would.
I entered the new house and looked out the back
window into the dense woods. I stared at lush
greenery and pictured the scene in other weather.
Red leaves, a few flakes of snow.
The seasons came and went several times,
and in between my mother died.
I was absent again when the moving van arrived,
when they raised up the back door,
empty but for the dark inside,
and after it was packed, when the sun was low,
my father told someone where it should travel,
where it should go.
Nancy Botkin’s chapbook The Honeycomb was the 2022 winner at Steel Toe Books. Her full-length collection, The Next Infinity, was published by Broadstone Books in 2019. Her poems have been widely published in journals such as december, Poetry East, Flying Island, The Indianapolis Review, and Eclipse. She is an editor at Wolfson Press and a retired Senior Lecturer at Indiana University South Bend.