Evicted

Sitting at the window of the Luck Brothers Coffee Shop
on First Avenue in Grandview Heights, Ohio
in the pleasure of absent friends
I am remembering my earliest day

warm in the yellow sun
sitting on our yellow porch
at my plastic yellow picnic table
my brother, my mother and me
eating our waffles with butter and syrup
before she has to go off to work
my dad spitting yellow puke into the toilet
I climb into her arms      she seems endless as a tree
her limbs offering me      to their own shade

she lives down the alley now with Dave and Max
(I had to get out of there for a few hours)
on the way I passed the old yellow house
newly clad in blue siding
except for the kitchen
it's old wood scorched black
from an oven fire. The siding seemed like armor,
indiscriminate, its walls working both ways:
a fire, sneaking inside, unable to find its way out
eats up everything within

Robert J Robert's yellow and black FOR RENT sign
was out front, familiar to us from the time
they moved all our furniture out into the yard
not long after mom left.
It seemed slightly like magic, our house turned
inside out, rooms undressed of their walls,
couch, tv, coffee table, desk, big wheel, plates, photo
albums, guitar, wurlitzer, clothes,
dresser, records, disney tapes, my brother
and I's bunkbeds, unhitched from each other,
arranged on a carpet of yellow crabgrass

my little yellow picnic table
thrown out on the lawn
hosting its feast
with no guests