Poetry by Susan Hodara
The nails that held the artwork
The holes left by nails that once held different artwork
The chipped plaster wounds around nails improperly but relentlessly pounded in
The narrow strips of glue that ensured the tiny print wouldn’t fall off the wall that now won’t come off the wall themselves
The never-resealed square opening in the basement stairwell where my husband had to cut through to retrieve a dropped wire, forgotten until the vintage metal Ambre Solaire advertising sign was removed
The thumbtack in the window frame where I dangled a ceramic angel
The cracks that slash from floor to ceiling
The crumbling plaster that has broken through the paint on the lower corners of so many windows
The yellow brush-stroked circle with yellow rays that my then-teenaged daughter painted up near her ceiling
The shard of masking tape from an unframed poster replaced long ago by something framed
The flaking paint everywhere
The smudges of dirt from this bump or that, a box rubbing, a suitcase banging
The black scrapes made by straightening the corners of canvases, a little up on the right, now down to the left
The stinkbugs that congregated, then died, along the top edge of the window in our bedroom
The phone jacks emitting wires that no longer lead anywhere
The dust that clings to the backs of bookshelves and paintings and dressers and furs the walls and moldings behind them, like dirty gray clouds
Susan Hodara is a memoirist, journalist, and teacher. Her work has been published in The New York Times and assorted literary journals. She has taught memoir writing for nearly two decades. She is co-author of Still Here Thinking of You: A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). Read more at susanhodara.com.
