I return to the house of my childhood and anger welters up to the seams of my body. I say: who are you, faded posters, to witness my body changing shape—getting bigger, looser? The same mother still offers her wallops upside the head, her Sabbath dishes scraping the roof of the oven’s mouth, but the elms are older, I am more dissolute, my bed is strange, the paintings I made at fifteen watch me with warped grins, my sisters are weary, my lover awaits me, the secret things and the colored glass I kept bundled in a cabinet are dusty; I see everything through my old glasses, they pinch at my ears, I seem to see my name written in a childish hand everywhere: on the windows, the doors, the belly of my sisters, there it is hidden in the hairs under the navel, five letters leering a half-moon leer on doorknobs, on forks, on the veins of the elm leaves.