LUCIANNA CHIXARO RAMOS / 5 POEMS
i. the impossible house
you stand at the front of your house
you don’t own it yet
you don’t dare dream it’s possible
you thank your husband for the face mask
and for buying into the doomsday-prepper trend
that happened ten years ago
your girl twirls in her pink, dingy sneakers
she ignores all the rules, touching
every surface in the empty house
whose dining room is painted
your favorite color: the ocean
or, like the ocean when it breaks open
the color waves turn when they begin
to unravel thousands of miles
south of you and the house you don’t own
your grandfather is preparing
his last meal which is: roasted
tambaqui and salad with boiled potatoes
the news is on too loud he talks
and grunts back to the newscasters
sass embodied for the last time
in his one room apartment you’ve never
been in back home your husband doesn’t
beat the rain you get caught in
soaked through and that night you put an offer in
and that night you get a phone call
that your grandfather died in his pajamas
with decency having eaten his last meal:
the fish that thrived only in his native land
ii. the impossible house
neither of your parents owned a home
not outright, anyway your father built
a house or rather he tried to
finish a half-built one-room on his mother’s land
when you were conceived years later
you visit the house that was never finished
your mother chastises your father for having
curtains as doors but she has never tried
to build a house your mother pays half of her
salary to live in a nice neighborhood
good enough for your brother, then another
neighborhood and another
she spends decades paying half of her
salary to live in a neighborhood
nice enough for you & you think of the
halves you’ve lived with
when you put the offer in to the house
with the sea-cap walls on the hill
your husband asks you to write a letter
to make the seller choose you
how to begin when the wave is cresting
iii. the impossible house
there was one apartment and then two
to list all the variations of home can be
very confusing what even
qualifies is it only where your name hangs
on a mailbox or where someone waits
for you with a hot cup for the tea, or
where do you draw the property line
from memory: there was #1 the apartment
where you were born zona sul, rio
white floor white couches white walls
where your grandmother lost all
the white in a fire, then #2
the one by the beach your mother’s friends
the man who would later be your step-
father streamed in and in and out
cigarettes smoking in their thick, glass
basins then #3 the one in the high-rise
in rio’s safer outskirts your mother
married then divorced after this
there is a shift across continents
northward to #4 the apartment where
you have a recurring nightmare in which
the stairs disappear and you are stranded
on the second floor no elevator
in sight then #5 the government
subsidized unit with the neighbor screaming
at your mother through the door the kids
on the bus smacking your dorky rental
violin case and, finally #6 a house
but not yours or your mother’s
a rental you could see the bus stop
from the backyard the mold you found was
quickly fixed you could have stayed
but there was more another shadow
in the shape of a man so
you moved yourself down the three miles to
your grandmother’s yellow house (is this #7)
which she rescued from foreclosure
& years later lost to foreclosure
but there was always food. and it was
clean so clean you smelled
the bleach-vinegar-pine-sol of it all
every tuesday the red tapping of
manicured nails on the dishes she always
asked how are you & though she turned out
a thief when you called her house
a home you didn’t know it
& now you think of how she always
asked how are you
and you never had an answer
iv. the impossible house
your seven homes are not even half
of the story you cannot tell the seller
of the house on the hill
your complicated personal history of homes
you are limited to one page & your husband
tells you to keep it short
which you interpret as keep it simple
so you create a fable of an immigrant
family which in reality is neither
your mother or your father have ever
owned a home they tried and worked
hard which taught you “perseverance”
and led you to this “moment”
the “moment” in which
you purchase “a home” and you do not say
they failed & you do not say you already
failed that your own daughter has
lived in half a dozen homes you
do not say that the seller failed either
though she has not taken care of the home
whose yards are filled with sunken treasure
& garbage & unbelievable amounts
of cat’s hair & dust have gathered
on surfaces whose complexities
you cannot yet understand & finally
you don’t say that the weight of the unsaid
has a way of getting real heavy
when you don’t have a place to put it
vi. the impossible house
you begin to think about the impossibility of home
that the concept of home
which you always thought of as permanent is nothing but a series of dreams
a dream is defined as a series of scenes or images that often contain the im-
possible such as magical beings or abilities they come to us in spurts their f-
ragments affecting our moods sometimes fleeting sometimes long-lasting i-
n that sense you begin to think of owning a home as a dream an idea that res-
ts on shifting landscapes of opportunity that make you feel like having a perm-
anent home shares equal odds with rolling the right die or winning the lottery &
monsters lurk around every corner & even when the “moment” comes and y-
ou make the “purchase” the scene can switch with the snap of a finger except
the finger is not a finger it is a medical bill or a lay-off or a diagnosis or the fi-
nger can be any of the continuous streams of money flowing in and out the ev-
er-flowing fountain of “family” expenses both large & small In a second y-
ou can be shaken awake tossed into a quiet manicured street with the imposs-
ible home receding into the distance once more just out of reach & you beg-
in again to think you know nothing not about dreaming or houses or neurologi-
ical diseases or the passage of time & you stop to recognize that you are he-
re through sheer luck a dice roll gone right and many others meant to destro-
y you gone wrong you stop to thank something or someone for being the i-
nvisible force that “got you to this place” you think reflexively of the “m-
oment” when the police officers told you I know him he’ll come back he’
ll violate the order the order is a piece of paper that keeps your ex-husband
out of your home no matter where and what shape it is & he never did but it c-
ost a lot & you feel as if someone is steering but you don’t really know wh-
Lucianna Chixaro Ramos is a US-Brazilian poet. She is a graduate of the MFA of the Americas at Stetson University where she taught a course on immigrant poetics. Lucianna has served as the editor-in-chief of Obra/Artifact and now works as a marketer and graphic designer by day. Her work can be found in the journals New South, Otoliths, The Collapsar, Fantastic Floridas, and elsewhere journal. A series of poems from a larger work titled An Index of Violence Categorized by Water Body is forthcoming in Bombay Gin.