Like clouds, 

I build people from window sills—

fill in sketchpads of their panes

with Monday nights.

Prints of tennis tournaments 

suspend from fridge magnets, 

notes for filo dough

fray thumbtacked to a cork overhang—

the recipe, a family heirloom;

the cork, left behind by the home’s 

previous owners. 

 

Faces eclipse

across channels of the glass.

I step, 

study a perspective painting—

 

Feather lines 

fringe a single mother’s eyes

because Jeopardy skips 

on her ex-husband’s TV box—

faulty cable from a man of faults—

and unpopped kernels fumble 

between her buttered fingers, 

lodge between stitches

of a faux Persian, 

also from a past love. 

 

Upstairs, a page

from a child’s coloring book. 

A baby wriggles in a bassinet 

between dreams 

of her mother’s heartbeat

and a father’s Sunday humming, 

too young to draw lines 

between memory and imagining. 

 

A house of drawings 

strung up by cedar boards 

on Blue Hill Street—

existence in outlines, 

like an artist’s sketchbook 

flipped open by the wind.