Kate Jayroe

Screen Door

I keep running into the screen door at your parents’ house

it’s like I’m blind but actually can see and the screen door is just a really deceptive screen door—each time this happens I think

this is the world

but my nose bounces flat against screen, calcified bug  

inside the not-world side, your parents’ kitchen is stale bleach and dark marble, preserved in heavy syrup jar-seal with camouflage appliances to all match the cabinets—grown folk design

tonight, there’s an egg on the counter, just one, sitting perfectly still

it feels the same as the room around it, even in its anemic scrape of a shell

on the world side, eggs don’t acclimate to design; yolk crackles out velvet hot wherever it can, manifests in the form of a rooster or perhaps a sea turtle, waterfowl

I step back to re-focus and slide open the screen

outside in world-side, a hot choir of quick-thinned mosquitoes whines into place