the smell of breakfast and the hum buzz of my sister’s television shows used to wake me and my eyes opened to the pink fabric of the creaking recliner and the faded print of poppies in a rusted frame

the duct tape on the back of the remote and the soft brown surface of the card table brought up to the sofa-sleeper were the most visceral of memories but the more subtle sensations like the smell of cigarettes and the blinking of the alarm clock remind me of the unfinished coloring books and words left unsaid because the relocation isn’t the only thing that fills me with trepidation of seeing you

you’ve forgotten, but i never will, the soup cans and fast food and the soap suds on my arms when i would wash my dolls in the sink, scrubbing their faces clean of the closet dust where they lingered with the melancholy of cheap forgotten toys (they’ve been passed on now to some little girl whose name you can’t pronounce)

my heart lies in the cereal cupboard and in the coils of the greying telephone that’s most likely been ripped from the walls since you left and brought your things with you (you don’t remember all the things you had to leave behind because home is a too-distant memory) and you won’t have to give your zip code for me anymore

i remember sitting on the carpet hiding wrappers in jewelry boxes and balancing checkbooks, piercing fake plastic grapes between my thumb and forefinger while my father burned his childhood and the charcoal embers fell onto the patio with the fake lava rocks and ashes from your cigarettes

i remember the frozen bread you used to keep in the freezer for the ducks and it becomes all too clear that the birds of my childhood have long since been dead