wildscape. literary journal

Featured Poet of Issue 6 – Read Interview Here!

What The House Does Not Know Yet
by Veronica Tucker

In the living room, sunlight
spools across the rug,
catching on puzzle pieces
left mid constellation.

The dog noses at the couch,
finds last night’s popcorn ghost
and makes it disappear.
Someone has left a sock on the table.
Someone has left a drawing of a dragon
guarding a stick figure family.

You move through it all
with a laundry basket on your hip,
collecting the evidence
that children were here,
that they will be back.

On the counter, your phone
rests face down in its own quiet.
You can almost believe
it is just a rectangle of glass,
not the mouth that drags you
out of sleep
and into other people’s worst moments.

In the next room, the television
murmurs under your daughter’s show,
a news anchor’s voice
threading between cartoon laughter.
You catch stray words
as if by accident.
School.
Shots fired.
Witness.

For a second the hallway narrows.
Your heart steps off rhythm,
remembering blood on tile,
metal on a stretcher,
the way sneakers look
when someone carries them in
without the person attached.

Then your son shouts
from the top of the stairs
to ask where his favorite shirt is,
the one with the planets,
and the spell breaks.

You tell him it is in the clean pile,
bottom of the basket.
You say it like a promise.
You lift it out and shake it once,
watch the tiny stars
settle back into their places.

about the author // Veronica Tucker