Building Our Houses Closer Together
High-rise apartments are fully occupied,
twenty-nine floors of twenty-two residences each.
The numbers beg to be multiplied, to yield
a reassuring statistic. Six hundred and thirty-eight
microcosms stacked, framed behind drywall
and glass. A pillar of that many lives
only reassures us of our littleness,
and perhaps the unspoken wish
to be on top of one another,
sharing daily commotion in noises
that trickle down the barber pole
of neighbors: the thud of shut cabinets,
the high-pitched trill of a shower head,
an alarm clock’s beep signaling that
like you, out there in the morning dark,
someone else has just awakened.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, writer, and instructor living in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in ouroboros review, Mankind Magazine, Spoonful, The Birmingham Arts Journal, and Artsy!Dartsy!. You can visit her daily poetry blog, The Storialist, at www.thestorialist.com.
“and perhaps the unspoken wish
to be on top of one another,”
i like the way you inserted that bit of observation
into your well crafted house..