{"id":242,"date":"2014-02-06T11:56:54","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T19:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/?p=242"},"modified":"2014-02-28T10:21:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-28T18:21:40","slug":"eric-howard-to-the-terrace-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/?p=242","title":{"rendered":"Eric Howard: “To the Terrace House”"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was good to see your guts knocked out
\nenough to fill six truck containers
\nand a new house rise from your frame
\nafter selling your aluminum sided,
\nearthquake crooked fugliness.
\nI regret kicking everyone out of you\u2014
\nthe drunk punk and lame director,
\nthe wannabe P.A. who slept in your shed,
\nDrummer Girl, a crackhead, a family,
\nand, finally, me. Your cracks in which
\nsilverfish, ants, and roaches trafficked
\nare gone like the black widow that charged
\nout between my eyeballs as I wrenched your drain.
\nNo more crawlies with countless knees
\nthat waved like Misfit mohawks still live in you
\nto complicate the porn shoot, 500 bucks for your bills,
\nwhere I learned the proper rolling of extension cords.
\nGoodbye, shed that no band played in,
\nsoundproofed too late to get Drummer Girl back.
\nI am grateful for your coffee pot
\nand happy pills, work by 8:30, boss says Saturday too,
\nthree million words by Thanksgiving’s greasy duck
\nI cooked for her just once. I respect
\nyour 70s shag carpet that my demented cat
\nused as a toilet. Thank you, overflowing toilets,
\nretaining walls that didn’t,
\nand water heater that puked to death
\nand curled the floor. Goodbye,
\nSurrealist bathroom and refrigerator,
\nand Sor Juana In\u00e9s de la Cruz,
\nthe hunchback iguana raised on burritos and Diet Sprite.
\nFor your mortgage I taught
\nEnglish 96 at the local CC, more
\nstudents than chairs the first night.
\nBless my evaluator’s bourbon breath.
\nI bid goodbye to the neighbor’s spite fence.
\nEveryone who lived in you\u2014teacher,
\nmother, faith healer, in-betweener\u2014
\npicked from the fruit trees of your bolgia<\/em>.
\nGoodbye, smoking air conditioner,
\nunplumb doors and untrue floors,
\nhouseplants dying in galvanized buckets,
\nand 436 thousand escrow fuckits. I miss
\nRoger, Sticky Nickki, and Chuckles,
\nwho came to collect from the psycho
\nSatanist Playboy model, Severina, who was already gone
\nafter getting high in the bathtub. The bullet hole
\nin your kitchen wall is gone. I washed away
\nthe red paint DIE!<\/em> and dog-hair pentacle
\nfrom your broken gate. From the chair
\non your porch I contemplated
\nthe snow tire, on a wheel, that bounded
\nthrough the glass door and thumped twice,
\nits studs ripping carpet, before going
\nthrough a window and down the hill. A burglar
\ntook a boombox through that window after it was fixed.
\nGoodbye, your bedroom that Drummer Girl
\ndidn’t come back to till morning
\nwhen I left for work and she cranked “Hooker with a Penis.”
\nAve atque vale, Halloween party I threw
\nto let her go with, waking up alone on the couch,
\ndoor open, various vomits. Goodbye, 300-yard
\nrestraining order circling you and me both.
\nI’ll let go of the 100 drunk attempts to have
\nthat sex again with someone else. Bless
\nthe notches in the shotgun choke
\nI pressed above my Adam’s apple,
\nbrain out of reasons. After a shiver, one\u2014
\nI’d cause more pain. She said I loved you more than her.
\nShe was love. You were duty. I failed both
\nand the picture of her in my sweatshirt,
\ndrumming, in the album with mostly empty pages,
\nby setting it on fire and watching it turn black,
\ncurl cancerous smoke below your grapefruit.
\nI’ll let fall those 50 50-pound bags of gravel
\nI shouldered down every step to the last level,
\nwhen the sun flexed like a drum, like a heart attack.<\/p>\n

Eric Howard is a magazine editor who lives in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Caveat Lector, Conduit, Gulf Stream Magazine, Hawaii Pacific Review, Old Red Kimono, Plainsong, and The Sun. In 2009 he attended the Squaw Valley Poets workshop and edited its anthology.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was good to see your guts knocked out enough to fill six truck containers and a new house rise...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-2","category-poetry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/terrace.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/296"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cronymag.com\/c\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}