Maverick Poet Award Finalist: “Ode to the House I Never Had” by Christine Larusso
Ode to the House I Never Had
At one point in my life, I saved
nickels in large glass jars,
thinking that someday I would own
a plot of land, maybe
one with a field behind it, maybe
one where I could grow
tomatoes up a long stake,
strawberries bursting from
strawberry pots, four dogs to roam
and dig holes in search
of voles. Then, they said it would
not get cooler. Then,
they said the earth the dogs loved to
dig in was too rough,
the soil spoiled from too many
pesticides, toxic runoff from
the factory farms we thought we
needed to feed us, all
of us, the cities growing and
growing. Then, they said
anything made of wood was subject
to burn, and there was
no season for fires, that there were
fires coming all the time.
The broken eight-ball I kept under
my bed as a child—
the eight worn down to one curved
line—never could have
predicted that all the nickels I saved
over all those years
would not be for a house, that I
would never have a house.
That instead I would spend the
coins begging for water
from the men who lived behind
locked gates, cul-de-sacs
full of ivory buildings made of
concrete they built for
themselves. We dug the dimes
deep, writing out stanzas
we memorized in grade school,
other words we wanted
to save for history, as we watched
the dissolve into an endless
black screen: S-O-S, mni wičoni, the
inland’s brush, the Mexican
gray wolf, passports, migrant
camps. Fire, how we once lusted
for your alchemy. You wouldn’t think
it, but concrete’s great
for writing on and carving into, if
you’ve got the heave.
MAVERICK POET AWARD FINALIST “Ode to the House I Never Had”
Christine Larusso holds a BA from Fordham University (Lincoln Center) and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Wildness, The Literary Review, Pleiades, Women's Studies Quarterly, Sycamore Review, Prelude, Court Green, Narrative, and elsewhere. She is the 2017 winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, and has been named a finalist for both the Orlando Poetry Prize and the James Hearst Poetry Prize. Her poem, "Lunar Understanding," was nominated for a Pushcart. She is a Producer for Rachel Zucker's podcast, Commonplace. She moved home to Los Angeles after spending a decade in Brooklyn.