A Trespasser's Song
Published by Outside the Box Poetry, book one
A Trespasser's Song
Maggie McCombs,
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NOMINEE, PUSHCART PRIZE 2025
I once thought my parents would thrive there until one or both died or, better, I did. We’d drift off on a careworn quilt overlooking the woods where we used to clear paths by picking up sticks. Like how I always imagined it. A dulcimer sounds a hymn from somewhere far away.
Harrowing to think of it now, to care only of—clearing, making, painting, loving, praying, dying in the Northwest Georgia mountains. Here, when this house was a building ground, sacrosanct. I will suspend myself there—regardless of when I left and how much I visited. Because the girl picking up sticks and singing had faith, if only in the forest, and would have made it home more often.
….
But you, officer, you showed up, sirens on, parting the gravel as we stood wide-eyed in the driveway. We had zero warning. Such an injustice to us! Don’t you, of all people, take trespassing seriously?
We never called 911 after all: We could have handled this sorry mess ourselves, sir, divvied things up illegally. I can’t believe they sold the house to you, with daddy being a libertarian. He signed the paperwork and everything, no tax evasion.
It doesn’t seem fair, does it, that homes get overwritten so easily—a fate worse than rotting, when we’re deprived of reasons to look back? Well, paint me out, shackle me, but I’ll have you know I am still in the walls. We stained them gray just for you, but I have one last feverish dance in front of the mirror left in me. I’m swiping finger-paint murals on the closet door, while boys plastered their letters all around you, so insincere: Can you hear it? This place, it bludgeoned us, and we hid by hemorrhaging.
I made your house a studio once. Choosing the colors for each room, christening them in yellow, sage, mushroom—reflective of my pastoral visions, homeschool afternoons in warm dormers with rhyming poetry read alone in honeyed solitude. Is that something that you can get used to in your sitcom existence of head-back laughs at everyone less privileged than you?
You should know too—your home was a hospital, strewn with insulin syringes; multiple, concurrent diagnoses and bad news paperwork of doctor’s scratch crumpled on the table: God, I hope you’re not ableist. How dare you bring gluten crumbs into this house? We eat cardboard here and only the good cholesterol. But it’s ok, we make do.
In this house, we serve the lord and work hard to stay well. It’s tiring, I hope you understand, when someone’s always prodding you, telling you something’s wrong with your body while they keep poking you to “Pray harder!”
There’s a grass-tinged treehouse out back, too. Take a break, then humiliate everyone the next day who’s partaking absent a badge, but, sure, pull me over for paraphernalia because you don’t like my hair color and cigars.
The pool is yours too, of course, the trashy swim-up bar where I nearly drowned skinny dipping with my friends the night I also chipped a tooth, victimized by wine. I try to stay above ground and hope not to offend, you know. But is it too much to ask for scenic highways and pine hills to hold me while I’m drying up?
On this site, there once rested a house church, sterile but noisy with visitors rolling in from the interstate without any notice—a kitchen table full of accents like ours. They’re all mixing religion and politics, filling their plates with it, shouting conspiracies that would get any normal person locked up while traumatizing onlookers.
So you can have the key I guess. I forfeit, officer: You win. I’ll leave. Let me be objective for once—this house has been worse than a jail and could use some law and order.
© Maggie McCombs 2024. All Rights Reserved.