A Natural History of My Apartment by Dylan Jesse

I would like to write a natural
        history of my apartment
where I dust my artificial ficus;
where I sweep away the stinkbugs
        that have died on windowsills,
        legs clutched into their undersides,
        a buggy I’m coming to join you, Elizabeth!;
where the long cycles of Pennsylvania freeze and thaw
        give the winter air opportunistic teeth;
where the stone walls ask me to join them in the rain,
        to listen to geologically-long stories
        about nights alone in the quarries,
        their long gestations underground;
where the baseboards gather loose hair and dust
        and fallen skin cells: here, you almost
        forgot about these, but it’s all right—it’s easy
        to let the small things slip away;
where the floorboards are still hardwood,
        remembering their lives as oak trees,
        how they would cast an orange net
        over their roots before winter, huddle back
        into their pore-streaked grains.
I would like to write that history
        the way I hear it told to me
        when the floorboards creak needfully
        in the December morning chill,
the way things communicate nakedly with touch,
        if they happen to touch.