How to Build an American Home

Jennifer S. Cheng

                                                                 If this house could stand

on one edge and beckon to the rest of the darker waves, as if to say, here.

A house on the edge is a house ready to unseam itself against the contour of

things unseen.

                                  In the great wind of the ocean, this house might begin to

murmur and speak in all the unpredictable places: groans in the bathroom tile

cracks, creaks at the entryway shade. Heard from the other side, its noises

might carry particulates into inarticulable spaces.

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