The Opposite House
This place:
a cavernous warehouse
of houses
dismantled,
catalogued,
reordered here
according
to part-rendered-
particle—
elemental—
the sentient
stuff of space
stored in meta-
space: this
room for doors,
thresholds,
staircases, risers
and stretchers,
banisters hand-
worn-smooth; this
for scrollwork,
moldings—egg
and tongue; for
floorboards—tongue
in groove; this
room for windows,
sills, sashes,
transoms; this
for mantles, shadow-
scents
of dead fires;
this a room
of bins: hinges,
doorknobs,
latches, locks. All
of it aged,
orphaned—
artifacts of the
slower fires
of neglect,
abandonment, before
bone-
pickers raced
the demolition for what
might be
salvaged to sell
again, like
prizing gold
from the teeth
of the dead, to be
re-measured, leveled,
grafted as though
re-made into
the agelessness
of someone else’s
household-now.
As long
as they are
here, though, the fact
of every door
remains
reference to
an antecedent made
vague—a
cellar hole an
empty socket
somewhere, or
a sandy lot
opposite some
newer house,
a sidewalk’s
stones’ arrival
into grass,
or daffodils blooming
like wild,
unmeant things
in what
appears an old field
without design,
the kind
sumac prefers
and will
encircle—its
own transfiguring
salvage,
that—slow,
unambiguous. 
Irene Virga Salafia
Limb Factory
The Ocularist
The Opposite House
