It’s not easy, dragging a house on your back.
But it’s still unfinished, so where should I set it down?
How should I stop the long haul?

That’s what one of them said to me once:
I’m in it for the long haul.
He had no idea I had a house on my back.
He thought he’d given me shelter; that was enough.
I tried to tell him. I’d say, This house—and he’d 
interrupt: Not that again. Thinking he could snap 
me out of it, out from under it, who knew. 

By then my father was dead. Shame
isn’t easily cremated. I could feel it there 
in the ashes, heavy, gritty, like the years of grime
the house had acquired while I hauled it along.

I left the long-haul one, found another.
This time, I kept the house secret. Pretended
I’d grown up in a house like everyone else’s. Floors,
windows, doors. But he kept feeling the air
around me. Something’s there, he said one night.
Something I can’t get at. I grabbed the storm door
that should have protected the actual door,
which lay on the dirt floor, back in the shadows 
like a man come undone. Like my father. 

So you know what happened to that one, how fast
his this-just-isn’t-working speeches came. The house
shifted on its cinder blocks but no wind was ever
strong enough to carry it away. Still the case—

when someone says my skin I think of the house
I walk in, the trouble it takes to fit into a car,
a theatre, aisles in a grocery store. The hitch in my gait 
is the slope of the roof and the hole where stairs 
should have been. Some nights I fly in my dreams, 
the house a shadow so heavy I’m about to fall. 
But I don’t fall. Or if I do, I wake. And the house, 
being solid—oh, the lovers who tried and tried 
to get their arms around me—stays.