Wuthering Heights

Bad men and worse weather drove me indoors. 

This Gothic dollhouse comes furnished & 

filled with tchotchkes: horse whip, dog muzzle, 

a table laid with chinoiserie to welcome the ghosts.

My husband is clairvoyant, never home,

writes to me in digital postcards. 

So we wait,

my four hundred and ninety-one sins and I,

for summer to come and blanch my bones.

Every phantasm of hope withers in late fall.

Barren oaks. Death underfoot. We try again and again 

to plant in the moorsoil. We harvest again

and again rotten squash in the south garden.

And in the dead-bolted stillness of winter,

my baby is afraid of the dark.

Emily Bulicz-Arnelien