NATALIE SHAPERO

A Moving Poem

At the end, the house
looked like it had gotten out of the house
and made us chase it through municipal
flower beds and culverts, maybe a lake,
before we dragged it home and watched it shake
itself all over itself. The moon was full

as moonyfish. The drawers
brimmed with busted plugs and other drawers’
handles. Splitting up the batteries
was easy, as we’d shopped exclusively
to match our blood types. Did you see the shrinking
larvae in the light bulbs? I was thinking,

beneath our silver school
of moon, about that short you made in school:
the windy-day pedestrian whose cap
went blustering off his head and through the door
of Lily’s Lingerie. Hard to be sure
if it was terror, shame, or some proud clap

of snobbishness that kept
him on the sidewalk, rooted as a kept
woman, but he could not venture in.
Beside the slogan-spangled mannequin
(“Our underthings will not be undersold”),
he shifted in his shoes. The credits rolled.