What You’d Really Find In My Closet

By

[KLOZ • it]

noun

1. belonging to my mother,
deep hideaway. secret stash. shoeboxes and emptied bottles. costumes that the woman she used to be wore, hanging like dried hides, perfumed pelts. the hunter long gone. his picture still framed, hanging over the bed. A taxidermic memory of a marriage mounted on the wall.

2. belonging to my brother,
children’s clothing folded and time pressed in cardboard boxes, photo albums half empty, three crates of matchbox cars.

3. belonging to my father,
well lit and sterile. a forty-five minute drive away. a stranger’s polo shirts.

4. belonging to me,
see: suitcase
see: driver’s side passenger door
see: bones draped in strange skin
see: wrapped in packing tape
see: matchbox
see: house fire