JUAN J. MORALES
YOUR NEW HAUNTED HOUSE
Your buyer’s remorse is sanding out
raccoon prints tracked in paint through the kitchen
and out the back door.
You will ask the wallpaper not to pull off
the plaster. You will put hands
in between floors
to replace leaky copper pipes.
You move into your investment,
starting with you
on an air mattress in the living room
until you finish a bedroom.
Then renovate the next room
like young newlyweds who don’t believe
in ghosts, oblivious to waking
malevolent phantoms
in the walls and left-behind furniture
stored in the basement.
Except there is no couple.
You’re on your own.
Instead of voices piercing the silence
with “Get out,”
they’re enticing you
to swallow the bitterness.
You’re tempted, but roll up your sleeves
to get your new haunted house cozy enough
to let the ghosts
you brought from the last house
mingle with the ones
already living in the solitude.
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*** ** ***
EATING HABITS
He wiped it with the cloth and bit into it. Dry and almost tasteless. But an apple.
He ate it entire, seeds and all.
—Cormac McCarthy, The Road
I bite into apples
with wrinkling skin, lost crisp,
that brown with every bite.
The apple’s wisdom tells me
to stop short
of finishing off
the whole core, so I can always
recall tastes that once
teased my tongue,
the knowledge mislaid
in my gaping stomach.
I practice
for meager times
just in case.
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*** ** ***
THE GREAT FLOOD
It sounded like someone taking a shower
when the water heater’s seam popped
to unleash enough water
to snap a prideful town’s houses and bridges
into shambles
of muddy brown.
We thought about vengeful deities sending
awesome waves.
We drowned mops. We littered the floor
with dirty towels.
We smacked wrenches against
the empty tank in vain.
We stood in
wet clothes, guiding the Shop-vac
on the soaked rug,
trembling mad when touching soggy drywall
with defeated hands.
We cleaned
every angry inch of the basement
on achy knees and wished
for time to stockpile
soggy books and blankets
like animals
huddled in an ark,
adrift at sea.
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*** ** ***
STANDING AGAINST THE TREES
Because the elm must be lonely
in a field’s wintered landscape,
featured in the tree poems I routinely see
in a journal that’s rejected me five times.
Because the tree stands for decline
and the nobility of aloneness, I resent it.
I’ve talked my share of students out of tree poems,
especially the ones featuring a tree house they feel
guilty outgrowing. These are my selfish aversions.
I’ve cut down the evergreens, dying in the middle,
but I never thought to eulogize them.
I’m not the hippie
who offered to do odd jobs but refused
to cut them because they were still alive, man.
Maybe I’m wrong and the poems and the trees
are one. Maybe that’s why I’m afraid of them burning down
and taking me out in the process.
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*** ** ***
HANDYMAN CHECKS FOR ALLIGATORS IN THE SEWER
It was Lennon and McCartney who said all you need is love, and
I would agree with that. As long as you keep the gators fed.
—Stephen King, “Why We Crave Horror Movies”
I descend to where gators must be flushed
after outgrowing novelty houses.
I can smell the bite of violence brewing
in stale water and waste. I am walking
against the rat traffic until tunnels
grow too small, search until the water gets
too dark, the light too weak. I approach
the flickering eyes above water,
jaws flexed. Offering myself to the reptile
that sent me colliding with sweating mains,
I sadly search into the slick grime,
the teeth crushing through the bones change my mind,
tugging me back through the labyrinth of pipes.
I surface and slide the manhole back in place.
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*** ** ***
HOW TO DISMANTLE A MIRROR
Behind my reflection, I slide
a putty knife to loosen the glass.
I chip through clear epoxy. I pull forward
with caution to extend the rift between
wall and mirror, optimistic
I can salvage it as a single sheet
until the first pop snakes and cracks
up the middle. I fracture it more
as I contort and bend the mirror, still tempted
to explode and smash it all down.
I never looked at myself in the large shards
that could free-fall and make
my vital arteries and limbs
hectic reds as seen in slasher flicks with enough gore
to make me turn away. I’ve always respected
broken glass and I already have a tab of seven bad years.
I count myself lucky to be sweeping up
dots of mirror off the floor, wrapping then breaking
the bigger flakes into a cardboard box,
and fooling myself into thinking I survived
all the horrors reflected around the house
with only yellow bruises and scrapes
I don’t remember placing.
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JUAN J. MORALES
Juan J. Morales is the son of an Ecuadorian mother and Puerto Rican father. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Friday and the Year That Followed, The Siren World, and The Handyman’s Guide to End Times (Forthcoming from UNM Press in September 2018). His poetry has appeared in Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, and others. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, Editor/Publisher of Pilgrimage Press, and Department Chair of English & World Languages at Colorado State University-Pueblo.
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A Dozen Nothing 