Extreme Domesticity

After Susan Fraiman

 

The women of the house glide through it, are unseen
as children, are children. I did not make these angels.

 

I, full-grown woman, live outside with a spade,
burying the Angel of the House, the Angel who lived here long before I did.

 

Her wings fold over her Christian crossed arms and shroud her in the dust swept
from the Castle Otranto. I bury her. And now

 

she lives dead under a burdened stone, the epitaph reading mother, grandmother,
great, great, great, ad infinitum—

 

 

I buried the Angel of the House with her petticoat, her hole-punched ballot, flower-
pressed rewildings.

 

When I return to the house, the half-grown women are in love with each other
and the world. Here, I am a visitor. I live outside. I bury the Angel.

 

I hang the sheets out to bird-flap in the wind and they turn into dry wall. At my back,
my bed linens are feathered, spectral. I’ve done them one thousand times. I say:

I’ve never been an Angel.

 

If and when I go into deep ground for myself, I will wrap myself around the Angel of

the House and beg to make a new domesticity.

 

My white dress is flour-dusted with dirt but I do not remove it. My husband bakes a

pie and is dressed in spoiled blueberries. Tell me I am a beautiful ghost, a dirty, dirty
ghost
, I demand. Angel, bury me!


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