All the Other Houses
Jessica Alexander
After María Brito’s El Patio de Mi Casa, 1990, mixed media
The patio of my house is private, when it rains it gets wet, like all the other houses. Pipes drain into the kitchen. The pots and pans are leaking. Outside the trees are black and broken. The moon is green. Yesterday I bit a peach and found a furrowed lip at its center. A bluebird cracked the cradle, fell to the grass, its wings, fat bags of plastic, flapped. Life is like this. Something I have murdered is buried beneath the chicken fat, the family portrait, the broken bird, and its bent beak. I fall asleep on the patio and wake beside a stranger’s sink.