You’d Have to Pay Me Could You Pay Me Enough

Sara Peters

You’d have to pay us

Could you pay us enough

To live for a stretch

Again in that house

Rippling through rooms

Papered with boys

Papered with dogs

As a means of escape imagining

Ourselves into every bad painting

Even ones of the purplest hell?

One of us moved

Through the house like a draft

She was tired

She said

She was empty

She was letting her body

Thin out and grow hairy

One day we brought

A picnic to her room

Spread it out like a stain

Waited for days

Checked our faces

In the tiny round mirrors embedded

In the skirt she’d left

We knew she’d abandoned

The house on a whim

(Like a blazer)

(Or a newborn)

We watched the apples soften

We watched the bread turn blue

We noted the second the sparkling

Water went still

Visit poem