because we leave
before the end
we do not know the sound
slab makes as it seals
darkness beneath

but we have heard pounding
machine-gun staplers
putting up boards
to shut up unprotected openings

this house our shared past
is in arrears
our taxes that small sum of joy
we have forgotten to pay
has caught up

and see the front door and windows
facing the world
shuttered
chain and lock barring
side doors

shards lie in wait in the grass
jagged teeth still in frames
slash
twilight
pooling
thick glistening
blood
from fresh
wounds


Ms. Vlasopolis has published The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); Penguins in a Warming World (Ragged Sky Press, 2007); No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000). She’s been awarded the YMCA Writer’s Voice Grant for Creative Non-Fiction in 2001, the Wayne State University Board of Governors Award and the Arts Achievement Award in 2002, has poetry chapbooks, Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members; as well as over two hundred poems and short stories, one of which was nominated for the 2006 Pushcart Prize.
www.vlasopolos.com