Where my aunt stood, behind the blue chair,
where she waited for night to fall, 
that was a sacred space, a hot spring 
bubbling in the middle of her living room. 
She waited there for hours, eyes trained 
on the window as the sun moved 
down across the hills. I watched her once 
when I visited my cousins. 
They paid her no mind, had seen it all 
too many times. 
They felt her stare like an iron weight 
on their lungs. They were ready to run, 
ready to tumble through the house laughing, 
banging against chairs. 
I loved how they looked like me, 
what I might have looked like as a girl, 
not exactly, but lithe and quick 
on their long legs. They could leap stairs, 
hang upside down on the monkey bars, 
squeal notes so high the windows shook. 
My aunt stood behind her chair, eyes burning, 
mouth a black hole through which air 
whistled as the girls twisted their backs to the darkening trees.
                        

My aunt comes into the house overjoyed. 
“That bastard next door fell 
and broke his arm,” she crows, 
the thrill of Schadenfreude 
dancing in her blood. 
For years she’s hated him, 
his hard mouth shouting 
at my cousins to get the fuck 
off his lawn,
threatening with a broom, 
as they laugh and scamper by.
His milk sours on the stoop,
his newspaper blows around, 
hangs in the branches of our maple tree. 
The Vulgar Boatman, she calls him, 
swears he’s a secret Nazi who ran a camp.
They scream at each other in Czech, 
as twilight filters through pines, dimming the sky.